


(and i feel fine)

by oogaboogu



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Warm Bodies Fusion, Alternate Universe - Zombie Apocalypse, F/F, M/M, anyway, brains :), does it count as character death if he is the living dead, mostly - Freeform, nice zombies, zombie!Emori, zombie!Murphy, zombie!Raven
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-27
Updated: 2020-10-31
Packaged: 2021-03-07 20:29:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 22,203
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26533651
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oogaboogu/pseuds/oogaboogu
Summary: M will be the first to admit that his memories from Before are pretty patchy, but he definitely remembers his mom telling him he was worthless, that he was stupid, that he was good for nothing, and good at nothing.So far that checks out: he was so crap at staying alive that he died, so crap at staying dead that he came back, and so crap at being undead that he’s now not-so-accidentally harbouring a bleeding, breathing, living human being in the broken down Build-A-Bear Workshop he’s claimed as his own personal lair. M doesn’t know why, but he doesn’t really fancy the idea of eating Bellamy’s brains.The hordes of undead just outside the door have no such moral qualms.
Relationships: Bellamy Blake & Clarke Griffin, Bellamy Blake/Gina Martin, Bellamy Blake/John Murphy, Emori/Raven Reyes, Gaia/Clarke Griffin, John Murphy & Raven Reyes
Comments: 16
Kudos: 52





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello! few brief things  
> –content warning for some very graphic violence and uh, zombies.  
> –i have only seen the warm bodies movie, and have not stayed very loyal to it. if there are inaccuracies with warm bodies lore it is entirely my fault. i have also never set foot in a build-a-bear store in my life and remain unsure as to how it works (thank u elle for explaining but i am, as the kids say, stüpide)  
> –the title is, of course, from the r.e.m. classic "it's the end of the world as we know it (and i feel fine)".  
> –happy apocalypse!

M’s not sure if he was ever a romantic. He doubts it, somehow. And yet, some part of him can’t quite shake the feeling that there ought to be more to life than this: the endless monotony of shuffling idly around the mall; moaning; building teddy-bears; bumping into walls; moaning some more; viciously killing and eating anything with a heartbeat unfortunate enough to stumble into his path... Surely, this can’t be it. This cannot be all that there is.

The other part of him scoffs, because of course it is: he’s literally dead. 

R—at least, he thinks her name had an _R_ in it, by the way she growls _RRRRRR_ at him whenever he’s done something that pisses her off—would be inclined to agree. 

R is definitely not a romantic. He’s pretty sure she hates the bear he’s made for her. He can tell by the way she takes it from his hands and, without any preamble, tears its fluffy white head from its fluffy white shoulders. Stuffing spills out onto her lap, and over her mangled and ruined leg. She hisses, and brushes it away with rough, clumsy swipes of her hand, as if she can’t bear for the teddy’s cottony guts to touch the sticky black ooze of her wound. Personally, M thinks that’s melodramatic of her. Yes, he ruined her leg—but it’s not as if she’s still got enough nerve endings left to actually _feel_ it.

He pouts at her. “Worked…on that.”

She just grunts, tossing the decapitated bear back at him. He’s too slow to catch it. It lands in two pieces inches from the scuffed toes of his sneakers, and he sees that he accidentally bled on its left leg; a splatter of black. “Ugly,” says R.

They’re hungry. Tensions are running high. R doesn’t want a teddy bear; she wants fresh meat. That’s what he tells himself, at least. But the truth is that the pale offering of a stuffed bear won’t change the fact he’s the reason that she’s stuck here, slumped against the wall of what was once the mall's very own Build-a-Bear Workshop. 

(M wishes he had a cooler lair. Like a bar, or a nightclub, or a bowling alley, or a dungeon, or a laser-tag maze. Instead, he’s got a steadily-growing pile of misshapen teddy bears and the humble beginnings of a button collection. Sometimes he eats the buttons because he can, but only one or two. He doesn’t want to rattle when he moves. He also collects cans of deodorant, but he’s not stupid enough to try and eat those.)

R’s eyes are like his—pale and colourless. Entirely dead, and certainly soulless. But he still thinks he can see reproach in them.

If he remembered how to sigh, he would. He’d better go find them some brains, then.

He makes his way slowly out of the store, sidestepping the shattered door hanging on its hinges, the _We’re Open!_ sign lopsided and stained. M’s humble Build-a-Bear Workshop abode is located on the top floor of the mall, and the lattice of skylights overhead are largely intact. The place is strangely quiet, though there’s a corpse picking at the peeling flesh of her ankle just opposite Forever 21; she screeches at him as he passes, and he figures she doesn’t have much time left before she’s unrecognisable. R has a name for them, for the dead that lose all memory of what it felt like to be alive, to be a person, to be an individual—but M doesn't care enough to remember. Sometimes he thinks he might not be all that far off from becoming one of them himself—from leaning against a _50% off!_ banner and picking away at his own flesh until he’s nothing more than ash-grey bones and mindless bloodlust crumpled outside Forever 21.

But other times he thinks he’s fine with keeping his decrepit flesh right where it is: firmly attached to his stubborn bones. It’s not courage or tenacity or moral fortitude that brings him to this conclusion. Mostly, it’s spite. He’s died once, and it didn’t stick. He would prefer not to give the universe the satisfaction of killing him again.

M totters down the wide hall, under the buttery light of what he supposes must be early evening. Time passes vaguely for M—he doesn’t sleep, and it’s not as if he can work a 9-5 in the undead office of deceased affairs. Divorced from routine, from any of the markers that ought to divide up his days, he exists in a strange sort of limbo, lonely and unmoored. A part of him knows this isn’t normal, isn’t natural. That part of him stays pretty quiet, these days, because he’s a reanimated corpse, and none of this is normal or natural. What does give a spark to his meaningless, monotonous existence, though, is murder. He loves murder. He lives for murder. And he follows the sounds of potential murder straight out of the front door of the mall. His battered sneakers crunch over broken glass, but he barely notices. He can hear yelling, and gunshots, and groans, and he is very very hungry.

Here’s where things in M’s life—or death, if you will—take a turn for the worse. And really, it’s all R’s fault. If R hadn’t let the scaffolding fall on her, none of them would be in this mess. Sure, maybe he was the one who broke the scaffolding, and maybe that’s why he feels a strange sort of pull towards her, an uncharacteristic desire to help her, to make her a teddy bear, to feed her the flesh she can’t catch for herself. If he still had a functioning brain, he’d know what to call it: _obligation,_ or perhaps _guilt._

As it happens, he does not have a functioning brain. Truthfully, it’s a miracle any part of him functions at all, given that he’s little more than a rotting sack of meat—a rotting sack of meat that may or may not now feel obligated to hunt for two. But guilt?

By and large, still a foreign concept. 

That’s why he has no issue with tangling his fingers in the curly hair of the pretty, red-cheeked girl in the parking lot, and bending her head so far backwards that her neck snaps like a sugarcane. He feels the _crack!_ just as much as he hears it. She’s dead instantly, slumping gracelessly to the ground; he’s too clumsy and slow to catch her. For one fractured, throbbing moment all he can do is stare at her body, her head bent at an angle that would turn the stomach of anyone who still had enough of a stomach left to turn. Her blank eyes catch on the fading dusk, and it’s a cruel trick of the light that it looks as though there are tears in them.

M doesn't dwell on it.

The fighting—gunshots and growls; the fading light stark against the tall banks of clouds that loom over the mall’s square roof; the _danger_ that buzzes at the ends of his burnt-out, deadened nerves—it all fades. The thrill of the hunt is fizzy in his belly, and he can only concentrate on the sticky warmth of the body beneath him, blood spreading hot on cracked tarmac. This is the only time M ever feels something approaching alive. He drags the body by the wrist, a treasure-trail of smeared scarlet leading behind the rusted hood of a car, away from the flying bullets, the whizz and rattle of machine-gun fire. He really should save her for later—save some of her for R, lying alone and prone against the wall of their shared lair. But he’s not feeling _that_ guilty.

He doesn’t wait. He lifts up her head and slams it down again, and then again and again, as hard as he can against the ground, like a monkey trying to crack open the shell of a nut. He’s frantic by the time he hears a familiar, delicious crunch, and glimpses the grey goodness within. Her brain is still warm, steam curling in the cool evening air. He dips his fingers in and raises them to his mouth—or where he supposes his mouth ought to be—sometimes, his body feels strange even to him—alien, wrong—like somehow it remembers what it felt like to be alive. Like even his cold, white flesh knows that this new half-life isn't all there is.

She’s barely dead. Her cells still crackle with electricity, sharp as pins-and-needles on his slug-grey tongue—so so **_alive—_ **

_She’s a child and it’s Before, and she’s grinning so wide it hurts—but the memories of Before are all faded now—now, it’s the ache in her chest when she sees him, her father, with milky blue eyes, vacant stare—the wrench of it—the loneliness of it—she’s lost everyone she’s even known. She’s lost it all._

He’s never tasted anything like it before.

_Her name is Gina, and she’s both deliriously, ecstatically happy, and dreadfully, bitterly sad. She made it east, made it to the compound—to safety. Her name is Gina and she's lost everything she’s ever had, but she’s still here. She’s still alive. And that's what matters._

_Her name is Gina, and the tall man with the warm brown eyes takes her small hand in his big one, and she begins to think that maybe losing everything she’s known and loved—maybe that would be bearable, if she could build something new from it. Maybe it would be okay, if she might gain a new kind of ‘everything’, if she might learn to build a new life, a new home, out of the ruins of the last—_

_His name is Bellamy Blake, and she loves him._

And M feels a jagged pain in his chest, right where his cold dead heart is.

Because he looks up, and sees a beam of golden sunlight caress the familiar, dark curls of Bellamy—BellamyBellamyBellamy—Gina’s Bellamy—and something deep in the cold, hollow cavity of his chest seems to stutter, seems to jerk. A flicker of something he’d long ago lost, flaring back to life like a struck match; the tail of a ladder drops down into the darkness, just within his reach. He recognises the feeling like one recognises the shape of a dream, and he feels such a tsunami-rush of _this is what life was like_ that he’s sure he could use it as rocket-fuel. He’s sure in this moment that he could eat the sun.

He’s on his feet in an instant. He’s sure he hasn’t moved so fast since the day he died. An unfamiliar zombie has lunged for Bellamy, has knocked him to the ground, has got her slimy grey fingers wrapped vice-like around his vivid, tan throat. She’s going to kill him. A surge of something that feels suspiciously like pins-and-needles, like _electricity,_ drives M lurchingly forward, the cracked tarmac tilting wildly beneath him.

Elbow pressed against the stranger’s throat, and all of his teeth bared, he’s got her pinned to the ground. He roars, and black and bloody spittle sprays the other zombie’s chalk-white face. He sees something like fear flicker far far below the milky film that covers her eyes, and he lets her go. Immediately, the zombie scurries back from him, her hands raised in what they both remember to be a conciliatory gesture. _He's all yours,_ the gesture says.

M turns around. In the red haze that had overtaken his vision, he hadn’t noticed that the sounds of fighting have faded. The human survivors have made a break for it—they’re being chased by the other corpses. The girl M had growled at rises to join them in the hunt, but M stays put, frozen and startled on the ground.

Whatever strange jerk he had felt in his chest is gone, now, but the _feeling_ of it—he still remembers it.

Behind him, he hears a groan.

He’s hungry, of course. He’s always hungry. But—

But, glancing behind him at the head of dark curls, the bruise just beginning to bloom around that vulnerable neck—M finds that, despite everything, he doesn’t want to kill him. Despite everything, M finds that nothing disgusts him more than the thought of sinking his teeth into Bellamy’s skin; finds that the thought of brown eyes clouded over by death makes something buried deep in his wretchedly silent chest twist.

Bellamy is stunned, but not dead. M, despite his undead condition, finds himself thinking very very quickly—though, given the circumstances, some might argue that M wasn’t thinking at all. He hurries back around the rusted hood of the car, and scoops as much of Gina’s brains out of the cracked cavity of her skull and into his jacket pocket as he can. Then, rising to his feet, he approaches Bellamy’s prone form, groaning on the tarmac, as one might approach a startled deer—quietly, carefully, and doing one’s best not to think about eating it raw.

He stares down at Bellamy, whose eyes are flickering as though they're about to open. Maybe he should say something. _Hello?_ No. Too casual. _Promise I won't eat you?_ No way: it’s far too long a sentence, he’ll never manage it.

But before he gets the chance to come up with the perfect, suave greeting to a man he doesn’t actually know and should be desperate to devour, he sees the blur of fast movement and feels the alien thud of a knife sinking clean into the space between his ribs.

Bellamy has him pinned against the car, one hand bunched at the neck of M’s t-shirt, and the other twisting the knife, though all M feels is an uncomfortable sort of massage somewhere around his left lung, a bubbling feeling like a swallowed burp. Bellamy, unfortunately for him, is human, and weak, and vulnerable. And M’s prefrontal cortex has been rewired and rewritten to know one thing only: how to kill. He hisses, and he ducks out of Bellamy’s grip, bending his arms back—but not so far as to break them—and kicking his feet out from under him, so that Bellamy lands with an _oof!_ on the ground, his head colliding with a painful-sounding thump against the dented metal of the car door.

The knife is still in M’s chest. He pulls it free, and tosses it away. It skitters over the concrete, stained black with blood, and far out of Bellamy’s reach. He’s unarmed, and pinned between M and the car. There’s no escape.

Wide brown eyes stare up into M’s own. M realises he’s scaring him. M realises Bellamy thinks he’s going to kill him now.

M crouches low, so low he can feel the warmth of Bellamy’s breath on the tip of his nose. Words, all of a sudden, decide to fail him, and his useless brain _glitches_. All he sees is brown, and freckles. All he hears is the rapid-fire thumps of Bellamy’s heart.

No—that’s not all he hears. Rattling breaths, low moans, the shuffle of lethargic feet and the crunch of broken glass.

The other zombies are coming back. M glances behind him—and sees the girl, the one from before, staring at Bellamy with her milk-white gaze. They haven’t realised he’s still alive, but they will. They’ll smell him. And there are too many of them. M won't be able to hold them all off.

Bellamy’s breath hitches in his throat, raw with panic. He’s trembling in the cage of M’s arms, his own crossed over his chest as if he’s attempting to protect himself. M’s white fingers are digging into the metal of the car door on either side of Bellamy’s head. His fingernails are lined with black—and he has an idea. M hisses a warning to Bellamy, though he doesn’t think he needs to, as Bellamy appears to be utterly frozen with terror, unable to flee even if he wanted to. M reaches down with one hand and dips his fingers in the sticky black mess the knife left on his chest.

Then he smears a streak of his own inky blood down Bellamy’s cheek; a stripe of black from cheekbone to chin. Bellamy’s nostrils flare, but he says nothing, just stares at M like he’s some sort of alien creature. M stares back. He wants to flex his fingers, wants to shake the warmth of Bellamy’s skin away—but more than that, he wants to chase it. He wants to touch him again, to press his fingers into that warmth, wants to capture it and keep it. He wants more. He’s hungry, but not for flesh and brains. He’s hungry for something he’d forgotten so thoroughly that now it feels new.

Almost immediately, the zombies approaching the car stop. The girl sniffs the air, head tilted to one side. Then, with a shrug, she turns and starts ambling in the other direction.

Next to him, Bellamy makes a squeaking sound. He looks faintly green.

M turns back to face him, and is nearly bowled over by the fact that he doesn’t know what to do next. Should he introduce himself? Is that what the living do? He already knows Bellamy’s name—oh no. Oh, _shit_.

He just killed Bellamy’s girlfriend. And while M cannot say he's an expert in social interaction, he's got enough sense to realise that the murder of a significant other is no foundation on which to build a lasting friendship. There’s something eating away at his stomach, and he’s worried for a moment he’s picked up some kind of parasite, before he realises that it’s guilt. Real guilt, this time, not that hollow echo of a feeling that he'd felt looking at R's shattered leg. Bellamy’s brown eyes are still wide with terror. All the colour has drained from his cheeks, making the dusting of freckles on his cheekbones stand out all the more. M doesn’t know if Bellamy knows that he’s sitting around a metre and a half away from the still-warm corpse of his girlfriend, but he’d prefer that he not find out.

He already knows Bellamy's name, of course, but he's not keen on explaining how. So, he points to his own chest with stiff fingers. “M,” he says. Then he pokes Bellamy in the chest, and ignores the way he flinches. “...Your’s…?”

Bellamy says nothing. M pokes him again, impatient. Bellamy is still living. His brain, presumably, functions fine, unless M slammed him too hard against the car door. He really ought to have no problem following what M thinks are very simple instructions.

“...Bellamy.”

M nods. “Follow… me…”

Bellamy stares, uncomprehending.

“Keep… you… safe…” M promises.

He doesn’t know if Bellamy believes him, but he does know that he’ll be damned ten times over if he lets anything happen to him. He smears Bellamy’s human face, human throat, with more black goo, masking his smell entirely, and then takes him by the wrist and leads him, silent and shivering, back inside the mall, past the unconcerned, oblivious throngs of the living dead, and into the belly of the proverbial beast.

Or, at least M hopes it’ll be proverbial.

***

M will be the first to admit that his memories from Before are pretty patchy, but he definitely remembers his mom telling him he was worthless, that he was stupid, that he was good for nothing, and good _at_ nothing. That was after his father died, and that was before _he_ died, but he still remembers it. He wonders if he could ever forget it; the poison in her voice, the hate in her eyes. The sneaking conviction that she was right.

Because so far, she has been: he was so crap at staying alive that he died, so crap at staying dead that he came back, and so crap at being _un_ dead that he’s now not-so-accidentally harbouring a bleeding, breathing, _living_ human being in the broken down Build-A-Bear Workshop! he’s claimed as his own personal lair. Not smart, not ideal, not a survivor’s move. He is selfishly glad now, though, that he accidentally crushed R’s leg and rendered her immobile, because no matter how much she screeches and hisses, she can’t reach Bellamy where he stands trembling in the centre of the store, staring in horror at R thrashing wildly in the corner, next to M’s collection of badly-built bears.

“Living!” R all but roars.

“Bellamy!” M objects.

“Eat!” R shrieks.

“No!” M yells.

Turns out in this enclosed space, there isn't quite enough of M’s very black, very dead blood to mask the thrum of Bellamy’s very red, very vivid blood as it pumps through his veins. They managed fine in the mall, though M’s unsure how his own rotting musk managed to mask the stench of Bellamy’s fear, spiking every time another corpse passed the two of them, M’s hand clenched around Bellamy’s wrist with a grip tight enough to bruise. But it did, and they're here, and M isn't quite sure what to do next.

He hadn't thought this far ahead, really. And he really hadn’t considered R, who is staring at the two of them with murder in her white eyes.

“What are you going to do with me?” Bellamy says, as if he’s been reading M’s mind. He’s got a deep voice, and while M can still smell the salt-sharp tang of his fear clear as day, Bellamy is letting none of it show. His fists are clenched at his side, as though he’s making an effort to stop trembling. The sight of it makes something in M’s cold, dead chest shift uncomfortably. He doesn’t want to scare Bellamy. He doesn’t want to hurt him at all. As he stares—shit, he’s staring again, isn’t he?—Bellamy slides down the wall furthest away from R. “Please,” he adds.

In response, M can only shrug. In truth, he doesn’t have a clue what he’s going to do with Bellamy. He’s sure of only one thing, irrational and unnatural as it is: “Keep… you… safe…”

Bellamy’s mouth is pulled down at the corners. “Why?” he asks.

M shrugs, again. That part is harder to account for.

The brains in his pocket are weighing down his jacket; a pang of hunger and pang of curiosity both poke him in unison. R has calmed down, a little, and is glancing between M and Bellamy with a distinct air of befuddlement. 

“ _..Bell...amy_?” she asks M, squinting. “R...really?”

“...What?” he asks, sliding down to sit a short way away from Bellamy, who is huddling with his arms wrapped around his chest again.

R just shrugs, one-shouldered and mild. Shrugging is their primary form of communication, and M is attuned to all the nuances. “Still… hun...hungry.”

M frowns at her—at least, he tries to frown. His face feels rubbery and numb at best, and as such he’s never quite sure what expression he’s making. He’s not had much cause to care about it, lately, but being around Bellamy has reminded him of all the ways, verbal and non-verbal, human beings communicate _other_ than shrugs and grunts. He thinks it’s criminal, frankly, that a simple growl won’t suffice. 

“Sorry…” He’s got Gina’s brains in his pocket, of course, but he is distinctly unwilling to give those away. “Tom...orrow…” he promises.

In the corner, Bellamy shifts a little. He’s got a wrinkle between his brows. “You’re feeding her? Because she can’t walk?” he asks. When M nods in reply, the wrinkle only grows deeper. “What kind of zombie are you?”

And at that, R snorts. She points to her mangled leg with a bitter kind of growl, and Bellamy twitches in fright at the sound. She clearly hasn’t got the memo: do not snarl around delicate human guest. Though, if M’s being honest, Bellamy seems anything but delicate. Where M has been nothing but scrawny his entire life (and non-life), Bellamy from first glance is broad-shouldered and tall. Or maybe he’s not that tall and M’s just prone to slouching. Either way, he’s no damsel in distress, and M must keep reminding himself not to underestimate him on account of his still-warm skin, his still-beating heart.

“Accident,” M reminds R, and she hisses. Bellamy jerks again. M is beginning to suspect R is enjoying it. But at least she isn’t hell-bent on eating him anymore.

“Didn’t know corpses took care of one another,” Bellamy mutters.

The three of them are left in silence at that. Because—sometimes they don’t. Often, they don’t. It’s a vicious world out there. As a general rule, there isn’t an awful lot of room for compassion at the end of days. But M’s always been pretty crap at following the rules.

R grunts, but M can feel her dead-eyed stare on him. She’s thinking, or at least, she’s doing her best approximation of it. Then, with a sick sort of crack, her head snaps around to stare at Bellamy. White eyes meet brown.

“O...kay,” says R. “Won’t… eat.”

“You won’t eat me?” Bellamy asks, his voice taking on a hint of hysteria. M imagines he must be pretty confused. M is pretty confused himself.

“Not… for you. For... M,” she pouts. “Won’t… eat…you... because M.”

“Your generosity astounds me,” Bellamy says, strangely flat, and with a thrill M realises he recognises that tone of voice, the narrow-eyed, one-brow-raised, head-tilt. Bellamy is being sarcastic—and M can _tell!_

“Safe,” M promises him again.

“Sure,” says Bellamy, wearily. He stays sitting up against the wall, though, eyes wide open and knees drawn protectively close to his chest, for many hours more.

***

Bellamy sinks into sleep sometime in the wee hours of the morning, head drooping at an uncomfortable-looking angle onto his knees. M climbs roughly to his feet, and picks up one of his bigger, sorrier excuses for a teddy-bear. Carefully, slowly, gently, he shakes Bellamy awake.

Bellamy jerks back, his eyes wild and charged white with fear. R lets out a cruel caw of a laugh, but both of them ignore her.

“...Here…” says M.

“What?” Bellamy's heart has calmed, but he looks to be still half-terrified and half-asleep, squinting at the proffered bear like it’s some sort of riddle he’s been asked to solve.

“Pillow,” says M, simply.

“Oh.” Bellamy takes it, carefully, in his clever, deft, alive hands. He glances up, at M, and a reluctant half-smile twitches onto his face. He doesn’t say _thank you._ Instead, he says, “I think I’m going crazy. I'm actually insane. Jesus Christ.”

Then, without another word, he slides down to the floor, tucks the teddy-bear underneath his head, wraps his arms around himself, and falls back asleep.

“Whipp...ed,” says R—but quietly, so as not to wake Bellamy.

M ignores her. He shuffles his way out of the store, the brains in his pocket weighing him down. Overhead, it’s a clear night. He could count the stars, count the way their glimmer and gleam echoes all of the broken shards of glass they twinkle over. The mall is quiet, as if it, too, is sleeping. Perhaps the others have gone hunting. Or perhaps M is just imagining things, like the fanciful fool he is, ascribing humanity to all kinds of inhuman things. He locks himself into one of the bathroom stalls at the end of the floor, sits his cold ass down on the closed toilet lid, and with a trembling hand lifts a clump of Gina’s cooled, coagulated brains to his eager mouth.

_“What do you miss most?” she asks._

_“Ice cream,” he says immediately._

_She snorts. “Shut up.”_

_“No, really. Remember ice cream sandwiches? Jesus. I’d cut off my own arm for an ice cream sandwich right now.”_

_The sun is standing sentry, bright and yellow in a vaulted blue sky. It’s impossible to imagine anything horrible happening on a day like this. Bellamy’s squinting up at it, all white teeth and laugh-lines. They’ll both have triple the amount of freckles by the time the day’s done._

_She knows he’s lying. Ice cream is hardly the thing he misses the most. She knows he had to be held back, forcibly, from going out into the wastes of the city when Octavia’s scouting party returned sans Octavia. She knows he was an orphan, before, and knows that he’s sisterless and alone now. The only Blake left. He has Clarke, of course, but Clarke was never his responsibility._

_Gina knows the guilt eats him alive. She knows all of these things, but sometimes all they want is to pretend like not having an ice cream or seeing a new movie or getting a nice pastry in a newly-opened café in over a decade is the real tragedy, because the loss of those things is bearable. Because missing the taste of an ice cream sandwich is not remotely the same thing as missing the laugh of a dead sister—but it’s a million times easier to talk about._

_She kisses him, then, capturing his laughing mouth with her own, because that is one joy this ruined world hasn’t taken from them yet. That is the one joy that remains entirely their own._

—And M’s stealing it.

He lets his hand fall into his lap with a dead thump, stares dry-eyed and furious at the graffiti on the toilet door, the graffiti he has no hope of reading. They might as well have been written in Egyptian hieroglyphics, he thinks glumly; the bits of Gina’s soul that he’s imbibed tell him that Bellamy, with his fanciful interest in history and myth, would like that. Hieroglyphics on the toilet door.

He could get lost in those memories. He could get so lost he would forget who he really was—an intruder, a watcher, a voyeur. A killer. There’s a new prickle of a feeling where his stomach used to be, an uncomfortable one. Bellamy doesn’t know he killed Gina, and he would prefer him not to find out. He would prefer nobody know.

 _Shame,_ he remembers. That’s the name of this feeling; a close cousin of the _guilt_ that got him into this mess to begin with. He’s been a corpse for what feels like a long time. He’s killed countless of the living without once thinking twice about it—why, now, is he beginning to feel so very ashamed?

The hieroglyphics on the door offer no answers. Not that M should expect any wisdom from toilet-graffiti, or from the broken porcelain he sits on, or from the row of cracked mirrors that greet him as he rises to his feet and lets the stall door swing closed behind him. They reflect nothing except his own monstrous gaze back at him, all those white eyes multiplied; making a horde of undead out of only one.

He finds no wisdom here, but the gnaw of his shame hounds his shuffling steps all the way back to his lair, where Bellamy still lies asleep, his head pillowed on a badly-built teddy-bear.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> my most gigantic thanks as always to sapphictomaz, blueparacosm and hopskipaway for so kindly hyping me up as i write this, and for so patiently listening to me yell about zombie!murphy having once eaten some buttons. PLEASE read their works they're all so grossly talented it makes my brain hurt. 
> 
> the next part is mostly all written and will be coming very soon i promise. any kudos or comment is so so so appreciated and will be gobbled up hungrily by yours truly
> 
> thank you as always for reading and hope our current less-than-sexy apocalypse is treating you kindly


	2. Chapter 2

When Bellamy wakes, it’s to M’s unblinking, milky eyes staring at him from across the room. Is that creepy of him? Probably. He continues to stare regardless. He’s fascinated in a morbid kind of way by the metronomic rhythm of Bellamy’s heart, by the steady rise and fall of his chest, by the glisten of drool that gathers at the corner of his sleeping mouth, by the twitch of his eyes beneath the paper-thin skin of his eyelids. The living are bizarre. Even in slumber, their bodies are never _still._ Then, those eyes open to meet M’s own, and he finds himself averting his gaze, something like embarrassment prickling the back of his neck.

So much for not being creepy.

“I want to go home,” Bellamy says, glowering.

“Not… safe…” M insists.

“You can’t keep me here forever.”

M shakes his head. “Couple days… Not… _safe_ …”

Bellamy doesn’t reply to that, sitting in his corner and wringing one of M’s poor unfortunate bears between his hands, pouting sourly. Then;

“I’m hungry.”

M tilts his head at him, almost incredulously. He’s already feeding one hungry mouth in the invalid, vulnerable shape of R—and now he has a petulant little living man to consider, too? He huffs. Life—well, death—is patently unfair. He doesn't know why he expected any different.

“Are you deaf?” Bellamy asks, sullen and rude. “I’m hungry.”

 _And what do you want me to do about it?_ is what M thinks. What comes out of his useless mouth is: “Hng?”

“Hungry,” says Bellamy again, slowly, enunciating the word, like he doesn’t think M understands him. In fact, M understands the concept of hunger perfectly. He idly reaches into his jacket pocket for some of the remaining brain matter to hand over to his guest—before he realises that he can’t feed Bellamy his _dead girlfriend’s_ _brain._

“I’m human,” Bellamy says, testily, “in case you’ve forgotten.” He pauses, then, a wrinkle between his brows. “... Have— _have_ you forgotten?”

Oh, yeah. That, too.

M growls by way of answer, and from the corner, R lets out a sound that might have once been a laugh. She’s been doing a lot of laughing at M lately. He can’t say he appreciates it. Nor does Bellamy, who jerks in alarm at the sound, but R’s dead eyes have no bloodlust in them now. She just looks amused. Well—she looks dead, but her dead expression is inching toward amusement.

“No,” says M, and he wonders if the strange new pull he feels on the numb flesh of his face is a frown. With what feels like less effort than usual, he pulls himself to his feet. “...Wait… here… then.” He pauses, halfway to the door, and glares at both of them. “Be… nice…”

Bellamy scowls at him, but R still looks painfully amused, smug as the cat that got the cream at his discomfort. M thinks grumpily that that’s brave of her—considering the fact she remains entirely reliant on _him_ to get the cream to begin with. Not that he would ever abandon her. He can definitely entertain the thought of it, though.

He’s out the door by the time he registers the stickiness on his palm; he’s still got Gina’s brain matter smeared over his hand where he reached for it in his pocket. It would be a crime to waste it. He licks a stripe from his wrist to his fingertips, tasting the electric fizz of it on his tongue. A rush of warm, such a sweet and foreign feeling, tingles in the back of his throat. He suddenly knows—even though he’s never seen it in person—that Bellamy has a lovely laugh. He throws his head back, smiles wide, white teeth glinting in the sun. It rumbles from his chest, deep and rich. M hates it. M wants to hear it for himself. M wants to cause it. M feels ridiculous. The brains must be bad. Too strong, or gone off, or something. They're getting to him.

There’s a Walmart on the first floor, and M shuffles his way there, painfully slowly, head hanging low. He’s trying to forget the sound of Bellamy’s laughter—a sound he's never personally heard. That’s creepy, isn't it? That he’s spying on Bellamy via his girlfriend’s brain? He thinks that might be creepy. What’s worse is that he doesn't know if he wants to creep Bellamy out _more_ just to watch him squirm, or if he wants him to be his friend. He’s clinically dead. Deceased. Proverbial clogs popped, proverbial bucket kicked, proverbial crosses Sharpie’d over his eyes. He doesn't _need_ friends. All he needs is fresh human flesh, or if not, the iron bite of a bullet to the skull or sharp end of a shovel jammed through his neck to put him out of his misery. It shouldn't matter what Bellamy thinks of him. But it does. And M hates it.

There is also the itty-bitty, teeny-weeny issue that Bellamy doesn't _know_ that M is carrying around his late girlfriend’s brain. He’s got it crammed into his pockets like some sort of grotesque squirrel hoarding nuts. And sure, Bellamy doesn't like him or trust him or want to be anywhere near him anyway, presumably on account of his being a reanimated corpse, but if he knew that M had eaten his girlfriend? He’s certain Bellamy would never speak to him again—or worse, try to kill him. Again.

The fluorescent lights in the supermarket still work, and he catches a glimpse of himself in the only window that hasn't been smashed. A string of hair dangles limp and matted down one cheek, and—after glancing around to make sure nobody’s looking—he reaches up and tucks it clumsily behind his ear, before squinting at the glass to examine himself again. It turns out having _more_ of his face on show doesn't improve his looks in the slightest. His skin is still the same pallid grey, his eyes still that creepy cataract-white, his lips still colourless and his throat bruised black. He scowls at his reflection, and turns to face the supermarket, the colours of the shelves spilled out over the lino where all the products have fallen, scattered like they're the broken pieces after somebody took a baseball bat to a rainbow.

What was once a middle-aged woman wearing a shredded floral dress and stained cardigan is pushing an empty shopping trolley up and down the empty aisles. She does this every day. M knows there’s a kid—no older than eight or nine, her hair styled in two pigtails—who sways back and forth on the swing set on the ground floor play area all day every day. There’s a rotting janitor who drags a dry mop over the bathroom floor behind the busted Target each morning. It’s like muscle memory; old secular rituals written so deeply into them that even dead, their living habits endure. It’s not a bad thing; it stops them from turning into boneys. Once you forget, once all those little traditions have faded, you have nothing left. M nods to the lady as he passes, but she barely registers he’s there. Too focused on her shopping, he supposes, though her cart is empty.

He’s looking for the canned food aisle. Most of the food in the supermarket is rancid; more still has long ago been raided by the living. M won't claim to be the brightest corpse in the mall, but he remembers something or other about food in dented tins being bad for you, so he leaves those ones where they lay on the lino, their metal edges glinting under the stark white buzz of the lights, and tries to look for ones whose shape is still intact.

He finds three tins in total that aren't dented, but he can’t read the labels to know what’s in them. No matter how hard he squints at the squiggly little shapes that he knows once were letters, they don’t reveal their secrets to him. He huffs. If he can’t even remember his own name, how can he be expected to remember how to read? Anyway, it shouldn’t matter, right? Bellamy is hungry, and food is food.

He grabs a dusty plastic basket on his way out, and tips the cans into it. They land with a clatter that almost surprises him. R will laugh when she sees him, he suspects—laugh at him arriving back to the Build-a-Bear store with his shopping in a basket like a suburban mom. Like he's a real person; like the world hasn’t already fallen down around them.

M is just making his way toward the exit when he trips over something in the hardware aisle. He barely keeps his feet, slow and clumsy as they are, and turns with a huff to glare at the offending object—a packet of duct-tape.

There’s a low-burning sort of spark in the clogged-up oil of his mind, greasy and dark, that sits behind his eyes—he might once have recognised it as an _idea._ Duct-tape. Duct-tape is very good, he remembers. Strong.

He thinks of the shattered bone of R’s leg, laid out uselessly in front of her; and he thinks of the storage closet next to the bowling alley with the brooms spilling out; and he thinks of very dim, faded memories of a nameless friend signing shapeless letters on the white cast over his arm with blue Sharpie—memories from the riotously loud, colourful schoolyard—like a vision from a carnival now. Illogically-sequenced, as unreal a dream, the way all memories from Before are. But there’s no room for M to miss that warm, safe world—because his narrow brain is all lit up with his _idea,_ and it crowds everything else out.

He tosses the packet of duct tape into his basket, and turns his head toward the homeware section. He’s got a couple final things to collect in the remains of this fine retail establishment, and then he’s headed straight back Build-a-Bear, shopping-basket over one arm and wooden broom clasped in the other. Let R laugh at him _now._

He holds out the basket and the broom triumphantly upon his return, and R and Bellamy both share the same skeptical look. Bellamy has moved from his spot on the floor to sit upon the cashier counter, but other than that, both of them look much the same as he left them.

M places the basket containing the cans of food and the plastic bowl and cutlery he picked up on Bellamy’s lap, ignoring the way his living guest cringes back at his approach, before carrying the brush and the duct tape over to R. She looks at him very dubiously as he waggles each of the two constituent parts of his _idea_ in her face, merrily.

“Splint!” he announces.

“Huh?” says R. She’s frowning, like she knows the word, but can’t quite remember precisely what it means.

“You got me tuna, canned peaches, and baked beans,” says Bellamy.

Both corpses turn to glare at him.

“Food,” M insists. He worked hard to get Bellamy those tins. It’s not easy being the sole breadwinner in the Build-a-Bear Workshop.

“Three whole food groups, no less. Lucky me,” sighs Bellamy. Then, he lifts up the pink plastic bowl and plastic spoon with a twitch in his left eye. “Is this _Hello Kitty?”_

“Match...ing set,” M tells him proudly.

(He could have taken him a blue bowl and a blue spoon, with a different cartoon character plastered over it, but a devilish little part of him insisted on getting Bellamy the pink.)

Like magic, Bellamy’s grumpy mood evaporates the moment he cracks open the can of tuna, and spoons some into his mouth. M wants to laugh, though he’s only capable of an amused sort of snuffle.

“ _Men,”_ R agrees, rolling her eyes.

Anyway, M’s got more pressing matters than Bellamy right now. He breaks the actual brush off the broom, leaving only the wooden handle. R’s leg isn’t very long, and there’s enough length on the handle to break it again, and brace a piece either side of her mangled flesh and bone. It’s slow going, until R catches on to what he’s attempting to do, and squeals, smacking him on the shoulder with excitement.

“Why… didn’t _I_ … think of… that?” she hisses, and he doesn't think he imagines the gleeful shine in her pale eyes. 

Bellamy ambles over, can in hand and cheeks bulging. He’s finished the tin of tuna, and is now working on the beans, but he puts it down when he sees what M is attempting to do. “Here, let me help,” he says, as he licks the spoon clean. “You can hold the wood steady, and I’ll tape it. Gimme—”

He lifts the duct tape, and unwinds it with a loud _scriiiiiiitch_ sound. Leaning forward, so close to M that M can feel the warm steam of his breath, he begins to wrap the tape around R’s broken leg, fastening the two wooden splints firmly either side. His hands move gingerly over her wound, and M wonders if he’s disgusted by the black ooze, the glisten of bone and the pale, bloodless flesh—until he notices that Bellamy doesn’t particularly seem to care that his fingers are smeared with oily viscera. No—he’s being so careful because he’s trying not to hurt her. He must believe, stupidly, humanly, that R can still feel it. He must think that she’s in pain.

M glances up at R, who is watching Bellamy work with an unreadable expression. She meets his gaze, and he knows that she’s noticed it too. She doesn’t say anything, and nor does M. He doesn’t think he has the words.

It shouldn’t come as such a shock, he thinks, that Bellamy is kind. He knows that. Gina’s brains told him that. But it still leaves him speechless, staring at his own cold, white hands where they hold the splint steady beneath him. His hands have known such violence, he thinks; have broken necks and pulled out eyes and torn limbs from sockets. It can’t be all there is—violence and want and hunger. He knows that that's not all there is.

“There,” says Bellamy warmly, once he’s finished. Neither M nor R move a muscle. With an exasperated huff, Bellamy takes each of M’s hands in his own warm ones, and lifts them up off R’s splint. “Let’s get you up then, R, shall we?”

Wide-eyed, R allows Bellamy to take her under the arms and lift her up to her feet. M takes a step back, and watches. Bellamy keeps a supportive arm around her shoulders as she stands—a little lopsided, maybe, but she’s standing. Bellamy lifts his arm so that it hovers, ready to catch her if she falls, but allowing her to tremble there in the centre of the store, upright and unaided.

“Wanna try taking a step?” Bellamy asks. He’s grinning, as if he’s happy. M wonders if he’s forgotten that R wanted to eat him yesterday, or if he just doesn’t care.

R just nods, and if she could be any paler than she already is, M thinks she would be. She swings her bad leg by the hip in a clumsy movement—and then staggers forward with the other foot. She shrieks, a wordless, delighted sound, and M sees Bellamy grimace, almost involuntarily, at the harsh noise. Maybe he _hasn’t_ forgotten R’s earlier bloodlust, after all.

Besides, he doesn’t seem afraid for long. “Brilliant!” he enthuses, and M thinks that, by the way that he’s smiling, he means it. “Good job, R.”

R spins around in place, teeth gleaming in a _grin_ —and then she’s lunging for him.

M’s heart—or such as what he has left—leaps into his mouth—he’s rushing forward in terror, desperate to save Bellamy from R’s gnashing teeth, her wild, charged eyes—

Until he realises that R’s not trying to kill him. She’s wrapped her arms around his neck, and buried her head in his shoulder. She’s—she’s hugging him. Bellamy looks just as startled as M feels. His hands, which were wide and defensive, slowly and shakily fall to wrap around R’s faded red jacket, and he hugs her back.

M lets out a breath. R lifts her head, and glares at him from over Bellamy’s shoulder. “Get… over here…” she hisses, and then she’s grabbed him by the collar and dragged him close, into the tight embrace of their impromptu group hug.

“This is insane,” says Bellamy. “I just—you’re _corpses.”_

“Well… observed,” says M. R sniffles.

The three of them draw apart, and Bellamy shakes his head again with a reluctant sort of wonder. Then his face falls. M follows his gaze to where his tin lies on its side, the lumpy, gooey contents spilling on the floor—knocked over at some point during the walking lesson, or the zombie lunge, or the sudden hug.

“Oh no,” says Bellamy, sounding truly devastated. “My _beans.”_

***

Mori nearly runs him over in the mall hallway. She has acquired yet another golf cart, and is zipping around the mall at a speed which is probably not significant in human terms, but for a zombie in a golf buggy, is practically insane.

She cackles as he only narrowly avoids being crushed, and flashes him a sharp-toothed grin when he yells wordlessly after her.

He likes Mori. She remembers most of her name, lives in the H&M changing rooms, and has the same penchant for collecting pre-apocalypse knick-knacks that he does. She once proudly showed him a very ugly sculpture she made from bent clothes-hangers, and is a vicious little killer on a hunt. He wonders if she was just a very vibrant person when she was alive, or if being dead has chipped away at all of her inhibitions. Either way, she’s dangerous on the golf carts. She crashed the last one on the broken escalator outside the bowling alley.

He’s left Bellamy to his _Hello Kitty-_ themed bowl of tinned peaches, and R to her ecstatic limping, making some excuse about wanting to check if there were any more cans of food in Walmart—but the truth is that he’s going back to the bathroom.

He hasn’t got all that much left of Gina’s brains, and for some reason he can’t explain, every time he thinks about eating more he feels strangely nauseous. Regardless, it doesn't stop him from locking himself back in the bathroom stall, and doing precisely that.

The memories are so vibrant. They swallow him in a riot of colour.

_She sees her father on a reconnaissance mission outside the city compound. He’s gathered with several others around a body so mangled she cannot even tell whether it was a man or woman, adult or child. He’s got blood smeared red around his mouth._

_“Dad?” she says._

_Bellamy’s tugging her back, harshly._

_“Dad?” she cries—and she knows—she knows it’s not him—it cannot be him—there isn't any of him left—but it doesn't matter. It looks like him. It once was him. And like a little girl waking up from a nightmare, she calls out for her father._

_The corpses—her father included—begin to run for them, and there is nothing but hunger in their grey, lifeless eyes._

The scene flickers, and changes; dead fathers are replaced with dusty laboratories, empty universities. M continues to chew.

_“Gina,” Bellamy is saying, something sad and reluctant in his voice, his hands coming to rest on her arms, “I think you have to allow for the possibility that maybe there isn’t one.”_

_She’s poring over the research papers, test tubes and petri dishes scattered across the lab bench. She had hoped to be a scientist once, and even with no formal training, the formulas and figures laid out before her sing to her—but never, ever, the song she wants to hear. She can’t find evidence of it. The cure._

_“There has to be, Bellamy,” she insists. Somewhere in the building, they hear a creak. Bellamy’s grip on her arm tightens._

_“We ought to go,” he murmurs. “It isn’t safe.”_

_“I. Don’t. Care,” she snaps back, and for a moment she’s vindictively, spitefully happy to see the hurt blossom in his eyes. Then, quickly, the feeling is replaced with guilt._

M lets out a breath, and fiddles with one of the many holes in his jeans. He’s still got some brain left, but some of Gina’s secondhand feelings are leaving nothing but a sour taste in his mouth. It isn’t right, he thinks, to be spying on Bellamy’s past like this. There’s a difference between eating the brains of a stranger, and eating the brains of someone who was once deeply in love with his… friend. It feels like there’s a line, there, and M, like the mindless animal he is, just can’t stop himself from crossing it.

He lifts another mouthful to his lips.

_Bellamy’s grinning, tugging her forward, reaching down to lift his shirt over his head—a flash of skin, a flare of an altogether new kind of hunger low in her—his—Gina—M’s belly—_

Nope nope nope nope nope. M spits out the rest of the brains. Viewing _that_ particular memory is _definitely_ crossing a line. He might be a flesh-eating undead corpse, but he’s not a creep. He stands up, and in a sudden queasy fit of embarrassment and guilt, takes the rest of the brain out of his pocket and dumps it into the toilet. It lands with a wet squelch. Before he can change his mind, he pulls the lever to flush it.

It doesn’t work. The plumbing’s shot. The brains sit there, glistening, in the toilet bowl. Briefly, he considers reaching into the toilet and lifting it back out again. Then, he catches ahold of himself.

“Not… a creep…” he says, aloud. He will _not_ fish Gina’s brains out of the toilet just to spy on Bellamy, no matter how much he wants to. That’s disgusting and immoral, and he’s done plenty of disgusting and immoral things, but he knows where to draw the line.

All the same, he thinks about Bellamy’s smile in the darkened bedroom with an uneasy sort of longing all the way out of the men’s fourth-floor bathroom.

***

He meets R in the hallway on the way back. Her eyes are wide, her face afraid.

“Where... is he?” M asks.

“Ran… away…!” she replies, gesturing to her bad leg with no lack of frustration. She can walk, but she’s slow, dragging her bad foot behind her.

M shakes his head in horror. _Ran away?_ The mall is thronged with the living dead. Bellamy won’t last ten minutes—what was he _thinking?_

R is pointing further down the wide hall. “...That… way…” she says, with all the urgency she can muster. M doesn’t need telling twice. He hurries through the mall with all the energy he can dredge up out of his dead muscles, nearly cracking his neck from the way he cranes it, desperate for any glimpse of Bellamy. R trails behind him, but he doesn’t think that she’ll mind, given the circumstances.

M had forgotten how it felt to be afraid. He remembers it now, though—remembers the dry mouth, the pins and needles in his chest. If anything has happened to Bellamy—if he allowed anything to happen—he doesn’t know if he’ll ever be able to forgive himself. Maybe it’s a side effect of eating the brains of his unfortunate girlfriend, or maybe it’s something else entirely, but Bellamy’s gotten under M’s skin. He can hardly recall what death was like without him.

An inhuman screech echoes down the mall floor. M breaks into an awkward, lurching run, turning a corner so fast his sneakers squeak on the linoleum, following the sounds of fighting.

A throng of three corpses have cornered Bellamy against a wall. Bellamy, for his part, has acquired a baseball bat somewhere, and is gripping it with white-knuckled hands. He swings wildly, and only the fear of getting brained is holding the three salivating corpses at bay. As M hurries forward, Bellamy swings the bat so hard it smashes one of the zombie’s skulls in. Then, the other two lunge.

M tackles the first to the ground, screeching violently. It doesn’t strike him as strange to slam the head of what was once one of his comrades so hard against the ground that it bursts open like a watermelon. He threatened Bellamy, after all. Bellamy, meanwhile, has his hands full with the other, bracing his hands against the man’s decaying chest and ducking out of the way of snapping teeth. With a roar, M rolls off the first corpse’s twitching body, and barrels into the legs of the second. They both slam hard against the glass of the storefront opposite. It smashes in a glittering rain around them, and the breath is knocked out of M’s chest with the force of the fall.

The other corpse is bigger and stronger than M is, though, and quickly he has the upper hand. His cold fingers—so unlike Bellamy’s warm, careful hands earlier that morning—have clamped around M’s throat. With the other hand, he lifts a shard of glass big enough to stab straight through M’s eye socket, and pierce right into his brain.

He’s going to die, M realises. Again.

Then, a baseball bat slams hard against the corpse’s temple. He slides off M with an aborted little whimper, cut off at the source. Then he lies still.

Bellamy stands over them, nostrils flaring. He holds out a hand. M takes it, and lets him pull him back up to his feet. Bellamy slides his hand up M’s arm until it settles on his shoulder, squeezing. He’s staring meaningfully into M’s dead eyes, and nodding. M can’t be sure, but he thinks that might mean: _thank you._ He finds himself nodding back, never once lifting his eyes away from Bellamy’s.

Then, in a blur of blue-headscarf-and-dark-hair, another corpse comes rocketing towards the two of them, teeth bared. She's going for the kill.

Before Mori can reach them, however, another figure throws herself against her. R bowls Mori right over, moving as quickly as her splint will allow. The two of them crash to the floor in a discordant chorus of hisses and moans, rolling until R has Mori pinned underneath her, sitting on her belly and pressing her into the floor, her bad leg splayed awkwardly to the side. R might not have full use of her leg, but she's still strong enough to straddle Mori's thrashing form and hold her fast beneath her.

“Living! Eat!” Mori cries.

R shakes her head, strands of black hair falling loose from her ponytail. “Friend… not… food!”

Mori hisses, angrily, and from her place on top of her, R hisses back.

Bellamy’s got a vice-like grip on M’s shoulder, his chest heaving where he stands next to him, seemingly frozen with horror. M doesn’t waste any more time. He shoves Bellamy forward, out of the puddle of broken glass and down the mall corridor, fleeing the sounds of Mori and R’s wrestling match until they've faded to nothing behind them.

Once they’re out of sight of Mori and R, M pushes Bellamy back against a wall. “Not… safe!” he whines. He wants to say: _why didn’t you listen to me, you idiot?!_ but he doesn’t think he has it in him for a sentence that size. Not right now, with panic still trilling up and down his nerves, sharp and shocking as ice water.

Lips pressed together grimly, Bellamy shakes his head. “I have to go home, M,” he says, and his voice is soft. “I can’t stay here. I don’t belong here. Please—I’ve got to go.”

M lets out a sigh. He still hasn’t calmed down from the earlier skirmish; his stomach is in knots, as if he’s about to vomit. But he looks into Bellamy’s wide, serious brown eyes, and he knows that he’s right. Bellamy can’t stay.

“Stay… together…” he says, firmly.

Bellamy doesn’t voice his relief, but M can sense it regardless. He pushes past M, and begins to make his way down the hall—in the complete wrong direction. M sighs, again. “Bellamy…”

Bellamy slows, and looks at M’s hand, pointing down the adjacent route. “Oh. Thanks.”

They’ve made it to the escalator before they catch a glimpse of another corpse, shuffling her way across the floor beneath them. Not eager for a repeat performance of earlier, M grabs Bellamy by the arm and stops him. After making sure they haven’t been spotted, M digs his fingers back in his old stab wound from yesterday, barely feeling the twinge of it, before he smears more black blood on Bellamy’s face and neck.

“Be… dead…” he instructs, before performing an over-exaggerated shuffle in order to illustrate his point. Bellamy nods. Together, they begin to make their way slowly past the corpse, which has been joined by four more.

Immediately, M encounters a slight problem.

Bellamy is hissing with every step, eyes wild, arms outstretched, in a ludicrous pantomime of the living dead. While the corpses do not appear to realise that he’s an imposter, they are throwing him strange looks as he passes. They suspect something. How could they not? Bellamy is moving like a puppet on strings—and the puppeteer is drunk.

“Too… much…” M says, out of the corner of his mouth.

Bellamy grimaces, and stops hissing.

They make it to the door without further incident. Then, together, they step out of the mall and into the driving rain.

***

By the time they make it to the city proper, having hijacked a car or two on the way, night has fallen and Bellamy is soaked. He’s shivering as they pass through back alleys and side streets. Although this part of town is usually empty of both living and dead, if they do happen to encounter any corpses M doesn’t think Bellamy will fool anyone into thinking he’s one of them, what with the tremble of his hands and the chatter of his teeth.

“Stop… for the... night…” he says, and though Bellamy looks distinctly unhappy about it, he doesn't voice any protest.

They climb a rickety, rusting fire escape and break into a third-floor apartment overlooking a narrow alleyway. M keeps watch while Bellamy raids the kitchen as quietly as he can. He’s successful, evidently, as the kitchen soon falls silent. Once he’s confident they haven’t been followed, M peers in the kitchen doorway to find Bellamy hunched over the counter, slurping a can of tomato soup.

Bellamy doesn’t take the bed; instead he drags in a blanket from one of the bedrooms to drape over the sofa. In fact, he appears distinctly uncomfortable about being in the empty apartment at all. Where M wanders around and peers into all the dusty photo frames, burning with morbid intrigue about the old world and its inhabitants, Bellamy averts his gaze, as if feeling ashamed of their intrusion. Whoever lived here is certainly dead, or worse, and Bellamy is treating the apartment with all the sanctity of a tomb.

M, on the other hand, has been living with the ghosts of the dead for as long as he can remember; there were many who would argue he was a ghost himself. He doesn’t fear them. He is curious, though, about the smiling faces in the photographs, about the albums stacked against the wall and the books on the shelves, and the notes fixed to the fridge door by colourful magnets. He wonders if he had had a home like this, once. He wonders what albums he might have listened to, or what notes he might have pinned to his own fridge door. Those memories are lost to him now—but that doesn't mean he isn't still dreadfully curious about them.

“Here.” Bellamy, with a wry look, holds out a sofa cushion. “Pillow. Not quite as cuddly as a teddy bear, but you’re dead so it’ll do.”

M snorts, and lies down on the carpet, resting his head on the sofa cushion and listening to Bellamy tremble on the sofa. His human companion doesn’t last long before he’s sitting up, shaking his head. “These are still soaking,” he gestures at his clothing. “I’m gonna lay them out to dry a bit. Hold on.”

Then, before M’s wide, wide eyes, Bellamy pulls his shirt over his head. Living muscles ripple under tan skin, and M suppresses a strangled squeak, quickly looking away. Squeezing his eyes shut, he tries to banish the memory of where he had seen Bellamy’s chest before, tries to forget the way he almost stumbled upon something private in the fractured remains of Gina’s brains. He still feels sick and creepy when he remembers that. Like he really _is_ a monster, in more ways than one.

Once he hears Bellamy settle down again on the sofa, huddled under the blanket, M turns back. Bellamy’s lying on his back, blanket pulled up to his neck, eyes fixed upon the ceiling. He isn’t shivering anymore. The faintest yellow light permeates in through the tattered curtains—streetlamps must be solar-powered, since all the electricity has long been shut off—but the street is otherwise silent as the grave. M knows; he’s been listening. They’re safe, he reminds himself. Bellamy’s safe.

“Do you… do you _have_ to eat people?” Bellamy whispers. It cuts through the fraught quiet in the room like a knife, and M sees that Bellamy has shifted to lie on his side, resting his cheek on his bent arm. There’s something heavy in the way he looks at M, something almost _mournful._ Like he’s grieving somebody, or something—only M can’t quite figure out who, or what, or when, that he’s grieving for.

“Yeah,” says M.

“Or you’ll die?”

“Yeah,” says M. He’s never been one to mince words; it’s a dog-eat-dog, man-eat-man apocalypse out there, and he’s not innocent. He’s seen the alternative—seen too-decayed bodies stumble and fall and not get back up again. They’re not like the boneys. They don’t lose sight of what it meant to be alive, to be human. They don’t abandon the memory of life. They just... grow too weak to hold on to it for any longer. And after that, there’s nothing left to keep their dead bones walking. M is determined it won’t happen to him; if one might kindly disregard the fact that he’s dead, he has always been a survivor.

He hopes Mori and R are okay, though. He knows that R has the splint they made for her; she can walk, now, even if she’s slow and stilted. And he knows that Mori—attempt on Bellamy’s life notwithstanding—is kind. She won’t leave R alone to starve.

“But you didn’t eat me.” It’s not phrased like a question, but when M turns his head to look at Bellamy, he can clearly see the curiosity burning in his gaze. It’s unsettling, M thinks, to be looked at like that. Like there’s more to him than just ice and rot and hollow yawning hunger.

“It must be hard,” Bellamy says. “To be—to be stuck in there like that. I can see you trying, M. You’re trying to be better.”

M doesn't say anything to that. He might have thrown away Gina’s brains, but his jacket pockets still feel sticky and stained. He left her face-down in that parking lot to rot. He probably still has her blood underneath his fingernails.

Then, Bellamy rolls over, so he’s lying on his back. M is staring straight ahead, but he can still hear the rustling of blankets, the shifting of his companion’s warm body on the sofa cushions, a long exhale of breath in the darkness of the room. A pang of terrible loneliness pierces him at that; at the soft noises, the shuffle, the space that Bellamy fills so effortlessly—where M’s lifeless carcass makes no organic sound, has no thrumming heartbeat. He might be substituted for a piece of furniture and no one would be any the wiser. Bellamy is _so alive;_ he brims with it, in every movement, in every word. He even smells alive—here and now, in the dark, he stinks of life, of warmth, peaceful and sleepy. The room stinks of it; the heaviness of it, the contentedness of it. If Bellamy were gone, in his wake he would leave a gaping wound in the world; M, on the other hand, is already nothing more than a ghost.

“You’re a good person, M,” Bellamy says.

M can’t look at him. He focuses instead on the crack in the ceiling, spiderwebbing across the plaster, like it’s reaching out for something. He lifts up his hands, clasps them over his chin. They’re sticky. They’re always fucking sticky. His fingernails look black in the darkness. He’s a corpse, he reminds himself, again and again and again. He knows it's a fact he’s been prone to forgetting, lately. He’s dead, he’s cold, heartless, rotten. He’s dead, and he killed her, and Bellamy is telling him that he’s good because he doesn’t know. He doesn’t know what M has done.

“...It was me,” he whispers, before he can stop himself. He doesn’t stutter. The words don’t trip on their way out.

“What?” Bellamy mumbles, sleepiness thickening his voice.

“Gina,” says M. He hears Bellamy’s sharp intake of breath, but it’s too late to stop now. He can’t turn back now. He follows the crack in the ceiling with his eyes, tracing a path from the centre to the edge, and then back again. “It… was me… I… I did… I did it.”

“Oh,” is all Bellamy says.

M finally turns to look at him. He’s wearing an expression that M’s feeble, zombified brain cannot hope to decode.

“I think I already knew that,” Bellamy says then, slowly, emotionlessly. “I mean, I had hoped you didn’t, but you were there when she... I had hoped it wasn’t you. But I guess I’m not surprised that it was.”

M just stares at him, at a loss for what to say. Bellamy sighs, again, and there’s something wet in it, something approaching a sniffle. 

“I’m… sorry…” M says, voice fractured and hoarse in the gloom.

Bellamy just nods at that, blinking hard. He rolls over to face the back of the sofa, drawing the blanket tighter around his shoulders, and for the rest of the night he says nothing more.

***

Bellamy doesn’t speak to him very much the next morning. He wakes when the sun does, and he dresses quickly and quietly, glancing out the dirty windowpane with a grim set to his jaw. “Looks like the way is clear,” he says. “We shouldn’t stick around. Can you see anything?”

M joins Bellamy by the window, and tries not to think about the warm shape of him in the morning light. It was a long night. M usually never feels the cold, what with being dead—but he’s sure that, somewhere around 5am, he had almost started to shiver.

The alley just beneath the apartment looks entirely deserted. Dawn’s orange fingers tiptoe over the weeds that push their way stubbornly up through cracks in the concrete. No birds sing, not here, and no alleycats chase mice in the gutters. This corner of the city is silent as the grave. M can’t sense anything, living or dead, nearby. He’s the only danger here.

He shakes his head, and Bellamy smiles, thin-lipped. “Best get going, then.”

They leave via the creaky fire escape. The city smells faintly of smoke, carried east by the winds. He wonders where the fire is. They cut through back alleys without a word, and they don’t meet a soul, living or dead, on their way—making good time, until Bellamy slows M with a firm hand at his elbow.

“...What?” M croaks.

“Can I just…” Bellamy begins to say, but trails off. “It’s stupid.”

“What?” M says again, impatiently. Doesn’t Bellamy realise his brain is running on fumes and the half-hearted efforts of a maddening virus? He can’t read his damn mind.

“The library,” says Bellamy.

They’re standing in front of it. The large brown building is still intact, though the roof sags a little, and the colourful posters on the window are faded and stained.

“You… want to… go in?”

“It’s stupid,” Bellamy says again, and M lets out a low moan, exasperated. Of course it’s stupid, but R was right: he’s whipped. He grabs the hand that has clamped down on his elbow, and tugs a wide-eyed Bellamy through the smashed-in door.

The library is hollow, echoing, beams of sunlight slanting in through cracked windowpanes and stippling the rows and rows of bookshelves with yellow. Bellamy’s got a face on him like it’s Christmas Day, and somewhere between the entrance and the first row of shelves, Bellamy’s grip on their clasped hands grew tighter than M’s. He’s the one dragging him forward now, between scattered piles of dusty books, all the way over to the history section. He rifles through all the titles that M cannot read, muffling a sneeze with his elbow as a cloud of dust rises up to tickle their noses.

“They’re in great condition,” he muses, flicking through the pages with one hand—the other is still clasped firmly around M’s. M wonders how the touch of his rubbery, dead flesh doesn’t revolt him. “You think I could carry some with me? You know what, don’t answer that. I’m going to do it anyway.”

M sniffs. He nods at the book Bellamy is holding presently. “What… does it… say?”

“You can’t read?” Bellamy asks.

M shrugs. He slips his hand free from Bellamy’s, awkward and—and embarrassed. He can’t read. He doesn’t even know his name. His hands are probably sticky with long-dried blood and brains. He still doesn’t understand how Bellamy can stand to touch him.

“It’s Herodotus. He was this Ancient Greek guy that travelled around and wrote about his experiences, about the places he went and the people he met. They call him the father of history. And also the father of lies, because he made a lot of shit up. Crazy things, like giant ants that dig up gold.”

M sniffs, and gestures to himself. “Crazy,” he points out. Whether he means the fact that up until a decade ago, zombies were a fantasy story, or that he is a particularly insane example of one—or both—he isn’t himself sure.

Neither, it seems, is Bellamy, as he cocks his head to the side thoughtfully. “Yeah,” he says. “I guess you’re right.” He puts the book down, and privately M marvels at the way the dust motes spin in the beam of light over his head, drawing new colours out of the dark of his curls. The library is silent, but for the sound of Bellamy’s breath. He might be the first living thing to set foot in this place in ten years.

“You know,” says Bellamy suddenly, running his index finger over the faded spines of the books and cutting a streak through the thick coat of dust, “I remember reading once about this famous anthropologist, from way way before the outbreak. One of her students asked her what the first sign of civilisation was—what the first sign of _humanity_ was. Most people expected her to say that it was the use of tools, or maybe evidence of religion, or handprints painted onto a cave’s stone walls.”

M isn’t sure where Bellamy’s going with this. He’s obviously not human, not anymore. And he isn’t civilised, either. He quite literally murders for a living. He can’t read or write. Most of the time he can barely talk. And Bellamy wants to discuss an _anthropologist_ with him? His confusion must be evident on his face, because Bellamy laughs a little, looking at M with his eyes crinkled up in the corners.

“I’m going somewhere with this, I swear,” he promises, wry. “Gina used to always complain when I got like this. Told me to get to the point.” The mention of Gina has M’s stomach knotting with guilt, but Bellamy’s smile isn’t sad—it’s fond. “Anyway, what I was saying was that the famous anthropologist disagreed with them. She said that the first sign of civilisation isn’t tools, or religion, or cave-paintings. It’s a femur-bone that’s been broken, and then healed.” 

M frowns, pointing at his skinny, jean-clad leg, bloodstained denim and tears in the knees. The memory is faint, an impression of a classroom, stripped of all details. Whatever he learned in biology class a lifetime ago is no use to him now, but he thinks he has a vague idea of what the femur is.

Bellamy laughs again. “Yeah, exactly. Your femur is your thigh bone. If an animal breaks its leg, it’s dead. It can’t walk, can’t run, can’t hunt. It’ll either starve to death itself, or end up becoming something else’s dinner. But a human skeleton with a healed bone means that somebody else came along and took care of that person until they got better. They protected them, fed them, hunted for them, all while they were helpless and hopeless. _That’s_ what civilisation is. That’s what humanity is. Helping somebody who needs it.”

M just stares at him. Bellamy’s eyes gleam, bright with enthusiasm, in the shadowy library. He’s leaning against the bookshelf, drumming his fingers over the dust, and looking looking looking at M—and M wishes he were just a bit more alive, just a bit quicker, just a bit more capable of decoding all of Bellamy’s moods and expressions—because he doesn’t know for sure what that look means. He doesn’t know for sure what the word “anthropology” means. He doesn’t know for sure what the analogy about the femur bone means. He doesn’t _know_ , and frustration at his own slowness—his own _deadness—_ gathers like a lump in his throat. He usually can pick up what Bellamy means by context, by the tone of his voice and the tilt of his gaze. Not this time. It may as well be another language entirely; Bellamy may as well be talking in bathroom-wall hieroglyphics for all the sense M can make of it—for all the sense M can make of _him,_ him and his bright eyes in the silent library.

“I… don’t…” he begins, slow, stammering, hesitant, and Bellamy shakes his head, curls falling forward over his brow.

“You don’t have to get it,” he tells him, softly. “I just wanted to say it, M. You saved me, yeah, but even before that, you were hunting for your friend because she couldn’t hunt for herself. I think you were always special. You’re not like any corpse I’ve ever met before.”

“But…” M trails off, the familiar twist of guilt in his belly. “... I…”

“Yeah, you killed her,” says Bellamy, and the familiar sadness cracks his voice. “But I don’t hate you for that, M. I don’t think I _can_ hate you for that. Just like how I can’t hate the sun for setting, or hate the clouds for the rain.”

M, hardly talkative at the best of times, is struck dumb. A new sort of silence sinks down between them, fragile and fraught in an entirely new way. He doesn’t want to break it. He doesn’t dare, not even to draw a breath he won’t need.

Something deeper in the building falls and shatters, a crash much too close for comfort. It echoes through the silence. M hears Bellamy suck in a gasp, sees his gaze fall to the flickering shadows on the dusty wooden floor, and rise to the broken glass of the library entrance, where a horde of skeletal corpses stand hungry.

Boneys. They’ve been found. The rows of hollow eyes all glare straight at Bellamy, whose breath puffs out in the chill, and the flush of warm blood drains from his cheeks. They glare at Bellamy, who is unmistakably, vividly, gorgeously _alive._

“Run,” says M.

***

R and Mori make up not long after Bellamy and M’s departure, after R shows Mori her splint. Mori likes that, likes the idea of fixing things, of making bodies better. She’s got a bad hand, stiff fingers. R isn’t sure how they’d fix that, but she thinks they’d lose nothing by trying. 

Anyway, they don’t worry about that for long. Mori is busy showing R how to drive the golf buggy. They bounce their way down the stairs, bumping their numb bottoms and rattling their teeth as the buggy jerks up and down, and have made it all the way to the parking lot before their trusty little vehicle breaks down for good. It doesn’t matter, though, because it isn’t long before the two of them locate a garage. In the garage is a jeep, hulking and grey and, in their shared opinion, very very sexy.

R gets the jeep running. She’s not quite sure how she manages it without the ability to read a manual. She only knows that the knowledge and the know-how—the engine, its pipes and wires, nuts and bolts—is all still there. Every time she blinks, she uncovers more, like digging up a treasure trove inside her own brain. Mori claps her hands together in delight when they hear the roar of the jeep bursting back into life; R feels the sudden urge to grab hold of those hands. So she does—though what ought to happen next, R can’t quite recall. Mori freezes, eyes wide.

R shakes the urge away, and grins. “Let’s… go…”

They’re reversing out of the garage—shakily, with more than a couple new scrapes to the jeep’s rusting paintjob—when the new memory rises to the forefront of R’s mind and bursts like a firework, like a flare. She gasps, and Mori looks over, the jeep stalling underneath her once-expert hands.

“...R?” Mori asks, concerned. A hand on her shoulder.

“My… name…” R whispers. “My name… it’s Raven. I… I remember.”

Mori’s mouth has fallen open. Raven wants to scream—with terror, with joy, with a newfound mixture of the two.

“Raven...” she says again, in slow, halting wonder. “My name is Raven.”

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (in case anyone happens to be curious, the anthropologist bellamy is talking about is margaret mead)


	3. Chapter 3

“Run.”

No sooner have the boneys stepped into the ruined library than M’s fingers have fallen like a clamp on Bellamy’s shoulder, wrenching him backward and behind him. The book he had been holding falls from his own limp hands; shock and fear flare and settle into a chilled, curdled mass in his chest; time slows down. 

Then the shadows in the doorway lunge. 

Moving with a surprising amount of coordination, M kicks the nearest shelf of books over, titles spilling out over the floor and straight into the boneys’ rampaging path. His white eyes are narrowed and charged with something flat and vicious; he looks almost unrecognisable—he looks like a _predator_. Bellamy isn't sure when he stopped looking at M that way.

There is no time to dwell on it, though, as M shoves him onwards, fear jolting through him like lightning. The two of them are running, their footfall splintering the hush of the lonely library. It almost feels disrespectful, like they're disturbing a tomb—only, in this instance, the dead really do hold a grudge. Bellamy can hear M knock over more shelves in his wake, but in the thick of the hunt M is faster than him, stronger than him, more capable than him. He is vicious and lethal, and Bellamy doesn’t dare to look back.

They careen out into the back hallway, and M slams his shoulder against the heavy door, snapping it shut and locking it. It rattles wildly behind his back, and Bellamy can hear the muffled screeches of the boneys as they slam themselves bodily against it. It won’t hold. M’s neck is ropy with the strain of holding it closed, heels dug in to the linoleum floor and arms braced out either side.

“Go!” he all but shrieks at Bellamy.

“Not without you,” Bellamy shoots back. A rusted water pipe is attached to the radiator on M’s left. “Grab that pipe, you’re stronger than I am—I’ll hold the door.”

M growls in frustration, but allows Bellamy to shove him out of the way. Now that he’s the once bracing himself against the door, he can feel the strain M was under. The hard surface seems to vibrate behind his shoulder blades as their attackers claw wildly at the other side. He doesn’t know how long he can hold it.

The pipe comes loose from the radiator with a metallic clang, and M has shimmied it under the handle, jamming the door shut, almost before Bellamy has noticed he’s moved. Even though he doesn’t need to breathe, Bellamy can see how his chest heaves. The door still jolts violently on its hinges; it won't keep them at bay for much longer.

“Come on,” Bellamy says, shakily, and together they hurry down the darkened hall. “There has to be another exit around here.”

They barricade several more doors behind them on their quest for the exit. Bellamy never expected a library to have so many back rooms and dusty corridors, rat-eaten archives and old filing cabinets left to rust. They finally locate the back door to the left of the staff room, where sandwiches left on plates have curled up like dried leaves and turned blue with mould, and, after carefully peering through the stripes of light between the blinds to check the coast outside is clear, they make their escape.

The back alley behind the library appears deserted, with only the skittering sounds of mice in the gutter. Overhead, the rubber casing has come loose from an electricity wire suspended between this building and the next; the sky is pale and blue and peaceful. Bellamy feels his heart finally settle back into an even rhythm.

Then there comes a familiar, bloodcurdling screech from the other end of the alley. The boneys haven't spotted them yet—but they will.

“Go, go, go!” M hisses, and the two of them take off running. They’ve reached the main road before they see another pair of skeletons come hurtling towards them, toothy jaws stretched wide and grey skin straining over the hollows of their cheeks. Their bones rattle as they pounce; a horde of grotesque, bloodthirsty grins. They’re surrounded—there’s no escape.

The first boney tackles M to the ground, and with a horrid banshee-shriek, goes to tear his throat out with its teeth. Bellamy has kicked it in the head before he can think to stop himself, feeling the jolt of the blow through the leather of his boot. The boney is knocked aside, and M gains enough of an upper hand to roll over and smash its skull against the concrete. The second boney seems caught between attacking M, or attacking Bellamy, its eyeless head flitting back and forth—Bellamy readies himself to fight, as futile a fight it’ll surely be—

—when he suddenly becomes aware of another kind of roar, growing louder and louder.

A a dusty grey jeep comes skidding around the corner in a squeal of rubber tyres and a wild, _familiar_ cry of joy. It hits the remaining boney at full speed. Bones crunch underneath the jeep’s tyres as it comes to a sudden stop before a frozen Bellamy. The skeleton the jeep ran over lies still and does not rise again; M, meanwhile, has succeeded in smashing the other one’s skull to fragments against the ground, and is hovering over its still form, his chest heaving.

“Hi,” says R, leaning out of the passenger’s side window. Just behind her, they can see Mori’s toothy grin, chalk-pale hands on the steering wheel. “You two... gonna… get in?”

***

“Raven,” R announces proudly, as soon as the two of them are settled in the backseat. Mori reverses backwards down the road with a gleeful cackle. Bellamy looks at the arrow that indicates speed on the dashboard jerk wildly as she foots the accelerator, and promptly decides to fasten his seatbelt.

“Raven…?” M asks.

“My… name…” she explains. “Remembered.”

“What?” Bellamy interrupts, leaning forward. “You remembered your name?”

Raven nods. She somehow looks a little less dead than she had before—her eyes aren't quite as sunken, and her cheeks have filled out a little. Bellamy can tell that she used to be tanned, that there ought to be a glow underneath her ashy pallor. She was beautiful once, he thinks.

“Not just that,” she adds. “Pictures… Saw pictures… in my… head. Sleep. My… mom. Finn. More.”

“Dreams?” he asks. “And memories?”

She nods again, grinning widely, her joy somehow infectious. “Mori… too!”

“What… what does… that mean?” M asks, but nobody seems to have an answer for him.

“Boneys… mad…” Raven adds. Her gaze meets Bellamy’s in the rear view mirror. “Looking… for you, M. Bellamy.”

“Yeah, we figured,” Bellamy says. “They nearly killed M.” 

He can’t shake the terror that still grips icily around his heart; every time he closes his eyes he sees the boney’s jagged, crooked teeth inches from M’s pale, bruised throat...

“Whatever… you did… you started something,” Mori supplies. “Me… Raven… others. Different. Changing.” She sounds relatively calm about the whole thing, her smooth voice unsuited to the slow starts and stops of her condition, a smile still tugging at her mouth. Bellamy can scarcely comprehend that she was trying to kill him yesterday.

“Not… just us,” Raven agrees.

“Destination…?” Mori asks.

Bellamy doesn’t look at M. “Home,” he says. “Get me as close to home as you can.”

“On it,” says Mori, and then she foots the accelerator. They whiz down the cracked highway so fast the city fades to a blur, and Bellamy has to resist the impulse to order M to put on his seatbelt, too. Somehow, he doesn’t think it’ll be appreciated.

As they drive toward the high walls of the safe compound, a walled enclosure on the edges of what was once a bright and bustling city, they see more and more corpses. They’re not idly shuffling around the hollow ruins of civilisation, either—they move in groups, with purpose, some even holding hands with one another. A strange and taut silence fills the jeep, a mounting dread laced through with something else—with something none of them dare name.

“What does it… mean?” M wonders aloud again. It’s the first thing he’s said in a while, and Bellamy glances over to see him pressing his face to the windscreen, brow furrowed into his best approximation of a frown.

“Boneys … chased them away…” Mori guesses.

“Why?”

None of them answer.

They approach the blocked underpass that marks the end of the road. From here, Bellamy will have to continue on foot. He can either go toward the heavily guarded gate directly, or sneak in via the secret door he knows is in the underground parking lot adjacent to the eastern edge of the wall. Bellamy doesn't particularly care which, as long as he gets home. As they draw closer to the underpass, the corpses that surround the jeep begin to grow thicker, gathering in knots around the cracked and broken section of highway. Bellamy can’t quite shake the idea that they look like the gathering forces of an undead army.

Soon, the bodies are too thick to drive through. Mori pulls to a reluctant stop, while Raven stares out the window warily. Just to be safe in case of any need for a rapid exit, Bellamy unplugs his seatbelt.

“I guess nobody can be convinced to just drive over them?” he ventures.

“I agree,” says M, and when he glances over at Bellamy, it’s clear he means it. M would be perfectly willing to run over any number of corpses if it kept Bellamy safe.

Bellamy feels an uneasy twinge at that, at what it could mean, at his sudden realisation that—were the situation reversed—he’d do the same. But that revelation feels just as large and just as impossible as whatever change has come over Raven and Mori, and Bellamy chooses not to strain himself by dwelling on it.

“No,” Raven says shortly.

Bellamy edges away from the side door. A corpse has caught his eye—a greying man, still as a statue, staring in the window—like he knows Bellamy is alive.

As corpses are wont to do, he strikes like a viper. One moment he’s still—the next, rotting teeth are bared against the glass of the windowpane, fingers clawing at the metal, a screech shredding the remains of his throat.

“Fuck!” Bellamy cries, jerking back so far he accidentally lands in M’s lap. He scrambles out of it again, willing away the inconvenient blush he knows is staining his cheeks, because now is _really_ not the time. Other corpses have caught on to the fact there’s a human in the car, and they keep coming, and coming, and coming, until the jeep is surrounded on all sides by a heaving mass of hands and teeth.

“Wait,” says Mori, “I… don’t think…” Lips pursed in thought, like a fool she opens the door.

Bellamy clutches at M’s arm, certain that he’s done for.

A corpse—small, a child, wide-eyed, bushy hair in pigtails, cranes her head in. She doesn’t move to attack, though. She just… stares. In fact, none of the zombies seem all that keen on killing. They crowd forward, yeah, hands outstretched and jaws wide, but… but they seem more curious than hungry. The little girl’s mouth is moving, as if she’s trying to form words, but no sound comes out. She looks between Bellamy and M, both huddled fearfully in the backseat, as if they hold the key to everything.

“Wow…” Raven whispers.

And Bellamy, feeling strange, feeling like a fool, reaches over M and opens the door.

The corpses step back to let him out. M hisses, trying to tug him back, but Bellamy just grabs his hand to still it. He doesn’t know what to say, so he doesn’t say anything. M glowers, but allows it.

Hand-in-hand, the corpses part to let them through, staring all the while.

“Where… you… going?” Raven calls out the window of the jeep.

“Home!” Bellamy replies, voice shaky. He can sense all eyes on him and M, on their joined hands, but not one zombie makes a move to harm them.

He doesn’t release M’s hand. There’s something different, not just about M, but about all of the corpses in the city; something that’s spreading just as fast as the infection that turned them into monsters had. And the only thing Bellamy knows for sure is that he can’t leave M behind.

So. Secret underground entrance it is. And, for some instinctive reason, he’s not all that worried about any corpses following them.

***

“This whole _dark_ and _tortured_ act is getting old,” Clarke had told him the last time he saw her. He knows it’s true and he resents it; some days he feels like _dark_ and _tortured_ is all he is—all he _can_ be—when he’s sure he used to know how to laugh. But it is getting old. Ninety percent of the people in their compound are similarly dark and tortured; that’s just what happens to somebody when they live to see the world end. Every rotting face pressed to the chain-link fence has a lost and forgotten history, and the living all dread seeing one they can name. Bellamy’s been lucky so far. He hasn’t laid eyes on Octavia—on what’s left of Octavia—once. The same can’t be said for Clarke herself, who had to be dragged back kicking and screaming from the boundary at the sight of her dad; Clarke who had screamed bloody murder when her mother had hefted the machine gun on her shoulder and blown her late husband’s rotting brains out. 

But Clarke’s always been tough as nails. And neither of them have ever been alone. She has Gaia, and he had Gina. Or, he had _had_ Gina, for a while, before she’d stopped smiling, too. Before she’d seen her father. Before all she cared about was a cure. It might have made her hard and sharp and ruthless, her endless search for a fix to this rotten, sorry world—but he had admired it about her all the same. He himself had long since given up on that particular fairytale. That didn’t mean he’d given up on living though. There was always something to live for, and if you lost that—well, then you find the next thing, and then the next, and so on, and so on. Clarke gets that. She’s alright. They’re both alright. The trauma is still there, but it’s scabbing over. They will _be_ alright.

He trusts Clarke.

But he still hides M behind him as he raps on her door, and warns him not to say anything. “Just, shut up and let me explain everything.”

M shrugs, and acquiesces easily. He seems almost overwhelmed by the human compound, though Bellamy’s been struggling to keep him hidden; he might be a little more lively than he was a couple days ago, but he’s still got a very distinctive, very _dead_ shuffle...

Then the door opens, he spins around, and Clarke’s staring at him with a mixture of horror, disbelief and delight, her baby-blues gone wide as saucers and mouth falling open into a perfect round O.

Bellamy yelps. “Let me explain!”

“Holy shit, Bell! You’re _alive—_ damn right I’ll need an explanation,” Clarke says, grinning.

Then she sees M. All the blood drains from her face, and her eyes grow hard and glinty. She’s reaching for the hockey stick she keeps just inside the door in case of ‘emergencies’, saying, “Bellamy— **_run_ **—” but he’s too busy waving his hands urgently while M is grimacing as if he can tell he’s not welcome. It turns out that M’s version of a grimace looks pretty damn similar to a snarl to the eyes of a stranger, and Bellamy doesn’t think his little zombie friend showing his teeth will be helping matters in the slightest, especially considering that Clarke is raising the hockey stick above her head with murder in her eyes—before he manages to spit out: “CLARKE. STOP. Let me EXPLAIN. The corpse is with me!”

She stills, hockey stick in hand, something in his tone having given her pause, but does not lift her icy stare from M’s mildly alarmed expression, his head hanging low and one hand raised in a faint attempt at a wave.

“... Hello,” says M.

“Bellamy,” says Clarke.

“Uh,” says Bellamy, and with one hand reaching behind him he prods M in the side, shifting him to the left so that he’s completely shielded by Bellamy’s own body. Now that it’s come down to it, he has absolutely no idea _how_ to explain M. He loves Clarke to bits, he really does, but he doesn’t trust that she’ll have enough patience to listen to what he patently knows to be a batshit insane story. 

“So this is my new friend, M,” he finally tells her, lamely, reaching behind him again to grasp M’s freezing cold wrist—

Only, some part of him registers, M’s skin is not _freezing_ cold at all. Just—mildly chilly. Could-do-with-a-hot-cup-of-tea chilly. The kind of cold that still remembers warmth; the kind of cold that might even hope for it.

“I can see that,” Clarke hisses, banishing all thoughts of M’s temperature out of Bellamy’s head. She has not put down the hockey stick. “Were you aware of his... _condition..._ when you befriended him, Bellamy?”

“I didn’t exactly, uh, _befriend_ him,” Bellamy shakes his head. “He saved me.”

Clarke finally drags her gaze away from M, who is only cowering a little. She stares at Bellamy, one sceptical eyebrow raised. “He did what now?”

Just then, they hear the telltale whine of the patrol car, only a couple blocks away by the sound of it. Clarke’s nostrils flare as she stares out into the night, at the lights approaching from the near distance. Then she sighs, harshly.

“Fine. Come in. You’re lucky my mom and Kane aren’t here, or you’d both be dead meat. But Bellamy, if he so much as _looks_ at me funny, he’s getting a hockey stick to whatever’s left of his brain, I swear to fucking God—”

“Noted, thank you,” says Bellamy, and, tightening his grip on M’s wrist, marches him in the door, and follows Clarke up to her bedroom.

She listens to the entirety of Bellamy’s explanation, though she stares daggers at M the whole time, mouth pursed and eyebrows raised. A taut silence descends once he’s finished. Clarke sniffs and pointedly doesn't say a word to break it, passing the hockey stick from hand to hand in a clear threat. M, from where he’s been sat on the sofa, posture slumped and hands in his pockets, looks distinctly uncomfortable—beneath his usual veneer of ‘blank’ and ‘dead’, of course. His bulbous, pale eyes keep shifting around the room as if he’s trying to map out an escape route, and his leg is twitching a little. Bellamy does not find it endearing. Not at all.

“Clarke?” Bellamy says. “Say something.”

Clarke leans forward on her interrogator’s armchair. “So,” she says. “What age are you?”

“What?” says Bellamy.

“What?” says M.

“Look at him, Bellamy. He could be seventeen or he could be twenty-seven.” She leans forward again. “How did you die? Where were you from? You don’t smell that bad at all. Most zombies stink, but you only stink a little. How long have you been a zombie? Clearly it’s been a while, if you don’t even know your own name, but you should smell worse. Why did you save Bellamy? And why did you help your zombie friend with the broken leg? I mean, what sort of monster are you?”

“Uh,” says M, alarmed. “I… don’t… remember…?” He looks to Bellamy, hapless and uncomfortable, as if he wants Bellamy to do the remembering for him. 

Clarke puts down the hockey stick. “Why did you bring him here, Bellamy? He’ll be killed the second he’s discovered. And he _will_ be discovered. The level of patrolling has been hiked up like crazy the past few days; I think they’re getting ready for something. It’s only a matter of time before someone notices him.”

M looks very alarmed at that.

“True,” says Bellamy, urgently, “but he’ll be killed outside the wall anyway. He’s _different_ , Clarke—”

“Evidently,” she mutters, looking M up and down, but waves a hand to let him continue.

“He’s different, and the others can tell.”

“Bellamy, are you telling me that you have snuck your new zombie friend into our humans-only, very safe compound, because he is _being bullied by the other zombies?”_

M makes a noise of protest, but both of them ignore him.

Lamely, Bellamy says, “I brought him here because I think they were gonna kill him. And it wasn’t the other corpses, Clarke. The boneys were after him. It was like they could smell me on him, or something. Like they somehow knew what he’d done.”

“Oh, even better!” Clarke all but shrieks. “He’s being bullied by the _boneys!”_

“C’mon Clarke.” Bellamy knows he looks uncomfortable. He nods to M. “He’s right here.”

“I’m… right… here,” agrees M, petulant.

“Well, we have to do something before my mom and Kane get here—oh!” Clarke’s eyes light up. Bellamy does not like that look at all.

“What?” he asks her, wary.

“I _had_ been saving it for a special occasion,” she says, “but I guess those are few and far between now.” She's mumbling, as if she’s speaking mostly to herself, brow furrowed. “And we are a pretty similar skin tone—at least, I think he _used_ to be pretty similar to me. It could work...”

“Clarke,” Bellamy says, patiently.

M appears entirely lost, his dark eyebrows pulled together and his shoulders hunched. He’s even pouting a little. It’s the most expression Bellamy has seen on him since they met, and it stirs up something strangely protective in Bellamy’s chest. M might be the strangest zombie Bellamy's ever met, but he’s still a fish out of water here, sitting quiet and polite on Clarke’s sofa, frightened she’ll brain him with a hockey stick. Just this morning Bellamy watched him toss half the shelves in the library at a group of boneys and smash another one’s skull in. It doesn’t feel wrong, M’s sudden fearfulness. Just—odd. New. An unfamiliar warmth in Bellamy’s chest, a loosening of something wound tight, like M has reached in between his ribs and effortlessly begun to unravel an impossible knot. 

“Makeup,” Clarke says, with an evil grin, shattering Bellamy’s train of thought. And then, M turns to him, with only human panic in his inhuman eyes.

***

They have to wrestle M into the shower, but once he’s in there he refuses to come out. At one point, Bellamy’s convinced he hears some off-key singing. Clarke takes one look at his discarded pile of clothes, nose wrinkled, before disappearing into her mom and Kane’s bedroom to locate some replacements.

M, skinny and pale and dripping where he stands wrapped in no fewer than three towels (one around his waist like a normal person, one around his shoulders like a cape, and one over his head like a hood), turns his nose up at said replacements. Bellamy convinces him to wear them, but M gets to keep his ragged jacket as a compromise. Clarke sets Bellamy to cleaning some of the more questionable stains out of the fabric while she blow-dries a surly M’s hair. Bellamy comes back with the (barely) clean jacket just in time to watch her gleefully dab foundation onto M’s chalky white face with a little sponge, the pink tip of her tongue poking out in concentration.

“Don’t… _laugh…”_ M sounds wounded. Clarke pauses in her artistry to smell the damp jacket, and then orders Bellamy to spray some of her floral body-spray on it, pointedly ignoring M’s scandalised gasp.

“I’m making you look like a human being again, so shut up,” she warms, before fishing around in her bag for some blush.

Finally, Clarke sits back in her interrogator-turned-makeup-artist armchair. “I think I’m done,” she says. “He looks…”

Bellamy pauses where he stands, sniffing the jacket to see if it smells more like flowers or death, and cranes his head to see.

M looks… human.

His skin is still rather pale, but it would look unnatural if he were any darker. A healthy pink flush darkens his cheeks, and Clarke has slapped some tinted lip balm on him, smoothing his chapped lips, and reddening them. His irises are still too pale, but as long as he avoids gazing into anyone’s eyes, Bellamy thinks he’ll pass. 

He doesn't just look human, Bellamy realises. He looks… handsome. Handsome in a strange, angular way, hair swept back, the light catching on his sharp cheekbones and strong jaw. Something new and not unwelcome makes itself known in the depths of Bellamy’s belly at the sight—but he’s quick to dismiss it. He’s never been one to chase after fairytales, or place his faith in impossibilities. And M is nothing but an impossibility. Makeup or not, it’s still a corpse sitting on Clarke’s sofa.

As if to prove the point, M snatches his jacket back and shrugs back into it with quick, jerky movements, clearly uncomfortable under their examination. He wears it like a suit of armour, hunching and scowling. He does look more like himself in it, and Bellamy is surprised to find that he almost prefers it. Not the dead look, per se, but the _M_ look. The man—zombie, whatever—that he has somehow come to know.

“What..?” M asks. “I look…?”

“Good,” is what Bellamy settles on, with a strange silly fluttering feeling in his core. “You look good, M.”

Despite himself, M looks a little bit pleased. The fluttering feeling only gets worse. _Stupid,_ he thinks, but he finds himself smiling all the same.

Then, from below them, they hear the front door open.

Clarke nearly jumps out of her skin with surprise, the makeup bag falling from her lap, its contents spilling out over her bedroom floor. She glances between M and Bellamy, stricken.

“Be alive,” Bellamy orders M urgently. He’s too anxious to enjoy the irony.

Kane knocks before entering. He looks haggard, hair falling into his eyes. “Your mom’s at the wall, Clarke. Corpses are gathering—she’s calling an evacuation. You need to come quickly—Bellamy! I thought you were dead!”

Bellamy stands. “No, sir. Almost was killed out there. Had to lie low for a couple days, but I just made it back.”

Kane nods. Then, his gaze slides over to M, who is sitting on Clarke’s soda, staring resolutely at his feet. He doesn’t comment. Maybe Clarke often brings strangers home, though Bellamy doubts it—or maybe Kane is just too preoccupied to ask. “Good man. I take it you’ve checked in with quarantine?”

Bellamy had done no such thing, of course, given that he was smuggling an actual infected corpse in with him. He nods.

“Well, it’s great to see you alive. You should go to the wall with Clarke, you and your friend there. We don’t know what the corpses are doing, but it’d be best not to get left behind.”

***

“Stop slouching,” Bellamy whispers.

“I’m… trying!” M hisses back. He really is, too; Bellamy can hear his vertebrae crack as he straightens his back. But it’s still not all that convincing, and Bellamy just prays that nobody looks too closely.

Clarke had quickly taken off to meet Gaia and find her mom, and Bellamy and M are hovering awkwardly at the edge of a small group of terrified evacuees. Soldiers—or, at least, the closest approximation of soldiers their compound can recruit—are hurrying back and forth, thin-lipped with fear, machine guns clutched in white-knuckled hands. Clarke had promised she’d talk to her mom, but Bellamy can’t help but worry he’s just offered M up like a lamb to slaughter. Abby Griffin was a kind and compassionate woman once, but this world has not been built for kindness or compassion, and he fears she won't be nearly as willing to listen to him as her daughter was.

“Where is she?” Bellamy murmurs, bouncing on the soles of his feet. He wants to grab M by the wrist again, wants to shield him, hyper-aware of how strangely vulnerable he is at this moment in time—the one dead man in a sea of the living. He resists the impulse, though he can’t quite explain why.

Kane arrives, then, directing the nearest group of civilians to the evacuation centre. Once they begin to disperse, he approaches Bellamy, who senses more than sees M tense next to him. Kane’s smile is cordial enough, though it doesn’t reach his weary eyes. 

“Bellamy,” he greets. “You made it. And this is your friend. What's your name, young man?”

M looks stricken. Kane is holding out his hand, expectant. With the slightest tremble in his arm, M takes it and shakes it, carefully. If Kane takes note of the coldness of his skin, he doesn't comment.

“M...att,” M manages, not meeting Kane’s eye. Makeup might conceal his pallor, and nerves might excuse his demeanour, but there’s no hiding those pale eyes.

“Nice to meet you, Matt. Sorry there isn’t more time to chat, Bellamy. Things aren’t looking great out there, and—”

Kane is cut off by the outraged approach of Abby Griffin, her daughter and Gaia hurrying behind. Clarke looks close to tears, and Bellamy’s stomach abruptly _sinks._ He shoves M behind him on instinct, ignoring Kane’s startled look.

“You’re insane, Mr Blake,” Abby all but yells. “If I wasn’t already occupied with defending our home from what looks like it’s going to be an _orchestrated attack,_ I would have you committed to the hospital myself!”

“Hey, what’s going on?” Kane says, looking more confused than anything else.

“My daughter here tells me Bellamy is running around claiming that the corpses—” Abby nearly spits out the word, “—are turning back. That they can be reasoned with. And that _he’s brought one of them in here with him.”_

“Mom, if you would just _listen—”_ Clarke begs, but Abby shakes her head roughly.

“He’s insane, Clarke, and what’s worse, he’s put us all in danger! He brought one of them _in_. God knows how many more could follow. Now, where is this fucking corpse?”

“It’s true,” Bellamy objects, ignoring the fearful twist in his chest that tells him that nobody is going to believe him, that tells him he’s sentenced M to a second death. “You have to believe me—one of them _saved_ me!”

Kane draws in a sharp breath. He looks down at the hand he had just offered to M, and then up at M where he hovers, awkward and tense, just behind Bellamy. “That’s him,” he whispers. “ _That’s_ the corpse?”

Abby has her gun aimed straight at M’s head in an instant. Bellamy takes a step back, keeping M firmly behind him.

“Step aside, Bellamy,” Abby Griffin says, soft and dangerous.

“Put the gun down, Mom,” Clarke says, and she’s crying for real now, tears dripping down her chin. “We’re telling the truth. I know—I know you don’t want to believe it. I know you think that means Dad will have died for nothing. But he won’t, and it’s true. M’s different.”

It’s Kane, however, who speaks up then. “I think they’re right, Abby,” he says, slowly and carefully. “He shook my hand. What sort of corpse shakes another man’s hand without tearing out his throat?”

But Abby just shakes her head. “It’s not true,” she says, and though her voice bears much less conviction, her aim does not waver. “Corpses don’t feel. Corpses don’t bleed. Corpses aren’t human, and there’s no saving them. Now _step aside.”_

“I won’t,” says Bellamy. He finally gives in to the itch, and reaches behind him to take M by the hand. “I won’t let you hurt him.”

“Nor will I,” says Clarke, and she’s got her own gun raised, and pointed straight at her mother. “You’re wrong about him, Mom, and I can’t let you shoot him.” To Bellamy and M, she says, “Run. Go. Get out of here.”

Gaia, who has up until this point stayed silent and watchful, slides her gun off her shoulder and tosses it to Bellamy, who catches it with his one free hand. “Go,” she echoes.

Neither of them need telling a third time. They turn tail and flee the scene, and Bellamy is careful not to once let go of M’s cold, limp hand.

***

They don’t make it far before they hear the telltale banshee screech of boneys just beyond the wall. There is scratching, too, a scratching that has Bellamy feeling ill with fear. Corpses are one thing—but boneys climbing the walls? Boneys mounting an attack? He’s seen the meagre remains of their army. He doesn't know if they stand a chance.

As for him and M—well, they can’t go back and join the others. It’s just the two of them, alone in the deserted streets, with one gun between them. They’re as good as dead. But, Bellamy reasons, ducking into the shadows beneath the porch of a long-shut restaurant, he’d rather die alongside M than let Abby or Kane execute him in cold blood. He doesn’t regret it.

There’s a flicker of movement down the street. M’s on edge immediately, still and keen as a cat on the prowl.

Raven steps into the orange glow of a street lamp, hand-in-hand with Mori. And they aren't alone, Bellamy realises; there are throngs of corpses here, hordes, all of them following Mori and Raven where they haunt the streets of the compound. Bellamy doesn’t know how they got in, and he can’t deny that the sight of so many corpses inside the walls sends his heart into overdrive—but it’s Mori and Raven who lead the charge, and he knows they would never hurt him.

Indeed, they pause just a couple metres from him and M. They look grim.

“Want… to help,” Raven says, firm. “Don’t… want to … kill. Want to help.”

“You started… something...” Mori agrees. “We… want to finish… it.”

“We… _feel_ … again,” says Raven. “We want… to help.”

“Thank you,” is all that Bellamy can find it in himself to say.

The first boney leaps the wall, and lands on its feet on the tarmac. A chorus of screeches rise up like a nightmarish choir, a rally-cry, and Bellamy feels a shiver run from the back of his scalp all the way down to his toes.

Then, another boney drops down. And another.

Corpses and skeletons face up to one another in the flickering glow of streetlamps. It will be morning soon, but right now the sky is low and dark, and Bellamy feels a claustrophobic sense of dread, of terror, M’s steady presence at his side the only hope he has at dispelling it.

“Run…” says Raven, face grim and brave and a million miles away from the gaunt corpse slumped in the corner of M’s Build-a-Bear Workshop. “We’ll hold… them off. Go.”

And for what feels like the hundredth time, Bellamy and M turn and run, chased by the spectral screams of the monsters hounding them.

***

The inhabitants of the last safe place in the country ought to have been overrun. Death’s agents, his horde, his skeletons—little more than skin and bone and vengeance, plague and famine and fury all rolled into one—mounted the living’s little defences and with ease they tore them down. 

The thing about death is that it just keeps coming, impervious to the living’s bravest efforts to hold fast. No matter how many monsters the men with guns shot down, three more sprang forward to take their place. Hope fled the ruins of the city as the sun began to rise.

Until;

A crowd of warming bodies, their failing flesh held together by sheer force of will, spilled onto the battlefield. For every hollow skeleton, there rose three corpses to stop it. And in every single one of those corpses, a long-cold heart was just beginning to beat.

They had routed the armies of death by the time the sun had risen. The living crept back down from their high towers, and clasped the hands of the once-living in tentative show of victory. Shaky breaths misted the air. Hearts beat on, in spite of everything.

Hope returned with the morning, when Marcus Kane reached out his hand, and the half-alive Raven Reyes shook it.

***  
  


They’re at the edge of the roof, and there’s one skeleton left.

(Bellamy shot down four as the sun began to rise. Three more chased him and M up the fire escape of an abandoned building, once upon a time the city hall; chased them all the way to the flat roof, where a garden stood dead and choked with weeds and a greenhouse’s glass door had been smashed in.)

(They move like a team, the living man and the dead one, each in tune with the other, like war has become a kind of dance; one neither of them like, but both know the steps to.)

(Bellamy was too busy aiming for one’s skull to notice how the other had wrestled M to the very edge of the rooftop, to see how it held him over the sheer drop, to see how its grey, skeletal hands closed around M’s throat. But he heard the song jar, the dance falter, and he knew he had to fix it. He blew the first boney’s dusty brain out, and sprinted for the rooftop’s edge. With his bare hands he dragged the creature away from M; his fingers sinking into decaying, stinking grey flesh. M then surged back up, and ripped its head from its shoulders with a sound like tearing cardboard.)

(There are better dances, in better worlds. Bellamy hopes someday they’ll get to try them.)

And now, there is only monster left.

In the clear morning light, the boney’s chest rises and falls in a mockery of breath. Sightless, soulless eyes glare into Bellamy’s own. M is a sure and steady presence at his side; out of the corner of his eye, Bellamy can see him craning his neck as he looks around. There’s no time to check on him, though, as Bellamy hefts the gun and points it at the boney’s cracked skull.

The gun jams in Bellamy’s hands. “Fuck, shit—”

“Do you trust me?” M says, interrupting him. He doesn’t stutter. His voice is clear and strong and sounds almost alive.

The boney is readying itself to lunge, and somehow Bellamy swallows his fear enough to tear his eyes away, to turn to M, whose face is pleading, whose eyes are filled with sorrow and hope and desperation, whose cold hands have wrapped tight around Bellamy’s wrist as if he’ll never let him go.

He hears the boney screech as it runs for them, but somehow the threat feels distant and unreal. He and M are all that’s left in the world; here, on the rooftop edge, M’s eyes swallowing his own, breath mingling in the smoky dawn chill. He knows what M’s planning. It’s insane. There’s no way they’ll survive it.

“Don’t you worry, Bellamy,” M says. “I won’t drop you.”

“I trust you,” says Bellamy. And he does.

And then M has his arms around Bellamy, encasing him in a firm, unshakeable grip, the useless gun falling with a clatter upon the stone. The cool skin of M’s forehead is pressed to Bellamy’s temple. It’s soothing and safe and feels like a promise. Bellamy sucks in a breath.

The boney barrels into them, a bone-shaking impact that knocks them flying. At once they’re falling, all three of them, the boney twisting in midair, screeching, but M’s arms around Bellamy are steadfast and unafraid. The fall only lasts one fractured, frantic second, a breathless, stomach-dropping plummet through thin air—but somehow M’s embrace feels more secure, more grounding, than gravity ever could.

M hits the water first, taking the brunt of the impact, his body shielding Bellamy from the blow. Bellamy doesn’t realise until they’re sinking that that was deliberate. M’s vice grip has released, instantly, and Bellamy surges to the surface entirely on instinct.

The fountain isn’t very deep, but it was deep enough to absorb most of the impact from their fall. Shaking wet hair out of his eyes, Bellamy twists around in the water to see the boney’s last dying gasp, spine bent in a right angle where it hit the fountain’s edge, cracked skull finally smashed on the hard stone. M must have banked on the boney’s collision with them having enough velocity to knock them far enough into the air that they’d land in the water, but not far enough that the boney itself would make it. Even if it hadn’t worked, Bellamy remembers how M had twisted in mid-air, making sure he was the one to hit the ground first, cushioning Bellamy’s fall—

The water laps at Bellamy’s chest, and he realises suddenly that M hasn’t come back up. He remembers how it felt to fall; the fear that grips him now is worse. He dives.

M’s body lies loose and limber at the bottom of the fountain pool, limbs floating lifelessly in the water, shirt riding up to reveal a scarred expanse of white belly. His eyes are closed, his face is pale, and his hair ripples out around his head in a dark cloud. _Oh no—_

He can’t be dead. He cannot be dead, because if he is, Bellamy doesn't know what he’ll do. He can’t be dead. Frantic, Bellamy grabs him by the chest and hoists him up. Together, they break the surface.

One moment passes, and then two. Bellamy cups M’s cold face between his hands, willing so desperately for those pale eyes to flicker, to open—willing desperately for him to show any sign of life.

Then M coughs. Water spills out of his mouth, face screwed up into a grimace, and he barely has time to blink before Bellamy has swept him into a bone-tight hug, a hug certain to squeeze out whatever life is left in him. He’s dizzy with relief, with the heady feeling of M’s chest pressed against his own, rising and falling steadily, water streaming down from both of their heads, washing their skin clean of all the blood and all of the fear.

When they finally separate, M’s long eyelashes are wet and clumping together, ringing his wide eyes, and his lips are parted with surprise. The impulse takes Bellamy by the throat, squashing all of his fright to dust, and it feels so very natural to give in—to lean forward and press that mouth to his own. He doesn’t care if it’s crazy, if it’s unnatural, if M is the corpse who ate his ex-girlfriend. The only thing he cares about is the fact that M is kissing him back.

And he feels— _warm?_

Breathless, Bellamy draws back. The eyes that meet his own are dark, the pupil blown black with shock, but the thin ring of iris he can see is not cataract-pale. It’s blue. He thinks he can see a pink blush stain M’s cheekbones—and it can't be the makeup, not after their dip in the water. Bellamy even thinks he can hear the chatter of M’s teeth.

“M?” he whispers.

Then a gunshot shatters the air. M jerks back to the side with a hiss of pain, and Bellamy is moving almost before he realises it, shoving M behind him protectively and turning to face their attackers with his arms raised.

“Move away from the corpse, Bellamy!” Abby Griffin says. She’s still got the gun levelled at him, and he knows she isn’t afraid to use it.

“Wait, Abby!” he pleads. “You don’t understand—he’s changing! He's different—he’s—”

Something in the corner of his eye catches Bellamy’s attention. Red. He can see a cloud of it, spreading like ink through the water in which he stands, dark and blossoming. It looks like—

He turns. M, wide-eyed and pale, is pressing his hands to his shoulder, where the gunshot left a hole in his ragged old jacket. His fingers come away stained scarlet.

“He’s _bleeding,”_ Bellamy finishes.

“He’s doing what?” he hears Abby say, but he ignores her, stepping closer to M, to place his hand over the spot on his shoulder where blood spills out, vivid and warm.

“I’m bleeding,” says M, in quiet awe. He hasn’t looked away from the red that stains his fingers, that settles into the lines of his palm.

“Does it—does it hurt?” Bellamy asks, and he doesn't know whether to be concerned or whether to laugh—at the horror of it, and the joy of it. It’s impossible. Corpses don’t bleed.

“Yeah,” M whispers, nodding shakily. “Yeah, it really fucking hurts.” He grins, looking up and meeting Bellamy’s gaze with those blue eyes. “I’m bleeding and it hurts.”

“You’re alive,” Bellamy whispers. “Abby—Abby, he’s alive. Don’t—don’t shoot. He’s _alive!”_

“Impossible,” says Abby, stepping forward, the gun falling slack. The soldiers that surround her also lower their weapons, sharing disbelieving looks. “It can’t be…”

But there isn’t any denying it, not now, not with the evidence billowing scarlet around the two of them in the fountain.

“I’m alive, Bellamy,” M says again, and he grabs Bellamy’s hand and holds on tightly, pressing it to his own wet chest, where they both feel the steady, sure thump of a heartbeat underneath the skin. “I’m really alive.”

“Yeah, and you need a goddamn doctor,” says Bellamy, but he can’t quite stop his grin.

***

Much like the rest of the world, M comes back to life slowly after that, revitalising in fits and starts. First, it’s the heartbeat and the breathing and the bleeding; the way it stings when Abby digs her bullet out of his shoulder. Then it’s the warmth returning to his chest and radiating outward, until Bellamy doesn’t have to blow on his fingers to chase away the chill. It’s being hungry—real, true hunger, craving cheeseburgers-and-milkshakes but settling-for-canned-beans kind of hunger—and it’s shitting out all the buttons he swallowed while he was dead—and that’s gross, but it’s the best kind of gross—funny, human gross, like fart jokes and pimples—nothing like rotting flesh and sightless eyes and monsters lurking at the bottom of stairwells.

It’s the way grief and loss haunt him now. It’s the way he begins to remember all the faces of all the people he killed. Or remembering Before, when he had a father and a mother and a small backyard. It’s the years after the Rising, when he lost his small backyard and then his father and then his mother and then himself. It’s the way he needs to sleep now, and the way that some days, it’s hard to get up again.

But not always. Because he’s alive again, now, and there is so much to live for.

Bellamy combs M’s hair for him the day they visit Gina’s grave. M’s still stiff in places—he can stand up straight, but he has an ache in his back from all the days he spent slouching, his dead body held upright by little more than stubbornness. The bullet wound in his shoulder that bled red blood hurts him in the evenings, and in the cold. His fingers are never truly warm, and his breath still stops, sometimes, in the middle of the night. So Bellamy combs his hair for him, because M would never say it, but that morning his shoulder and his back are causing him problems and he can’t reach up himself.

Gina is buried at the edge of the park. There are still corpses in the woods, both the living-dead and the dead-dead, but the living-dead are coming round and there are graves being dug for the dead-dead, for the nameless and the forgotten. There are places being made to remember them in, and this is one of them.

They pass countless rows of carefully placed headstones—and they’re just that. Stones. No engraved names, no carved shapes, no crosses. Just stones, all different shapes and varying size, as long as they’re just about large enough to stub one’s toe against. As long as they disrupt the grass that sprouts up bravely on the fresh-turned earth. As long as they may mark a spot where some anonymous person rests.

“Do you remember your name yet?” Bellamy asks. M frowns—still pale, still cold, still stiff and numb—but his eyes are blue, and his lips are pink and chapped, and his breath puffs out in the cold. He’s crawling back to life more and more every single day.

“John,” he admits. “I think… I think my name was John.”

“ _Really?”_ Bellamy can’t say that _John_ suits him—it seems far too ordinary a name for a man like M—for a man so extraordinary he dragged himself back from the dead. For a man so extraordinary, a man who felt so much, so deeply, that he set a movement in motion that broke death’s chokehold on the world.

“I don’t like it. I prefer M,” he says. “I think it was the first letter of my surname.”

“McClane,” Bellamy guesses. “Marley. Montgomery. McAuley. McCarthy. Murphy. Mackowsky. Madden. Malcolm. Martin.”

M squints, brow furrowed. “Maybe.”

“Your surname was Maybe?”

“No.” M shakes his head. “I’ll remember it,” he mumbles. “Soon. I will.”

Bellamy can feel his indulgent smile split his face in two. “I know you will,” he tells him.

They’ve reached Gina’s grave. It’s one of the few that are marked; her name carved roughly into the stone. The best they can do for now, while all the old parts of society that cared about things that aren't necessary for survival, but necessary for living, like libraries and headstones, are still rebooting. It’s just a small grey stone, and the two of them stand hand-in-hand before it. The sun slants through the trees as it rises, spinning gold out of thin air. 

It had been M who brought her body back, wrapped in a blanket, half-decayed. He hadn’t apologised in so many words—Bellamy suspected M was not much of a man for apologies—but he had brought her to be put to rest, and here she lay.

“You know,” says Bellamy, “I always forget it was her brain that started all this.”

M’s mouth twists guiltily, but Bellamy squeezes his hand.

“She was looking for the cure, you know,” he tells him. “She was desperate. I think she would have done anything for it. And, in a weird kind of way, I think it _was_ her, in the end, that caused it. I guess she found the cure after all.”

“She just had to die for it,” M grumbles, but by the squeeze of his fingers Bellamy can tell that he’s listening, that he’s taken some comfort. They can afford that, now. Comfort, and hope.

They stand there in soft silence then, the warmth of Bellamy’s hand leaching into the cold of M’s own, until the sun is well and truly risen; a morning vigil over Gina’s grave. She might have been buried with no brain in the end, but all of her heart remained entirely intact.

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the (silly, soppy) end!
> 
> big big big love as always to sapphictomaz, blueparacosm and hopskipaway who have been so kind and supportive about this story since the beginning. this chapter especially ate me alive, pun intended, so it was much appreciated. if you are unfamiliar with the works of the users i just named please rectify that immediately as their talent could honestly rouse the dead
> 
> thank you for reading and i hope you liked my silly little zombie story saying rip to the 100. hope you and yours are able to stay safe and stay spooky this fine halloween.
> 
> \- oog


End file.
